SENSEx Lab - Funded Projects

Discovering the Effectors of LIfestyle-driven Memory enhancement via InflammaTion (DELIMIT)

The Italian Ministry of University and Research awarded a PRIN grant for a 2-year project to a team formed by Prof. Marco Mainardi from CNR and the University of Padova (project coordinator), our PI Mathew Diamond, and Prof. Serena Bovetti from the University of Turin.

"We believe that our studies will elucidate precise cellular, molecular and functional mechanisms through which environmental enrichment results in better cognitive performance via modulation of inflammation, paving the way to the design of “enviromimetic” drugs."

Neuropsychological and neural circuit mechanisms for projecting memory into future choices (FORWARD)

The Italian Ministry of University and Research awarded a PRIN grant for a 2-year project to a team formed by our PI Mathew Diamond (project coordinator) and Prof. Elisa Ciaramelli from the University of Bologna.

"We make decisions based on envisioning the scenarios that might arise from alternative choices…How do we envision the future and fold it into our current choices? FORWARD addresses this through a unique cross-species blend of experimental methodologies, with resolution ranging from whole brain to single-neuron. The overarching strategy is to conduct human neuropsychological studies to uncover how memories contribute to the representation of future scenarios; in parallel, FORWARD pursues animal studies to identify neuronal mechanisms for the interface between memory and future-thinking.”

The first M2M team in-person meeting in Trieste, 2022

Memory: from Material to Mind (M2M)

The 3-year project “Memory – from material to mind” (M2M) worth over 1 million USD has been awarded by the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) to a team composed of our PI Mathew Diamond (project coordinator) along with physicist Nathan Keim of Pennsylvania State University and neural networks theorist Omri Barak of Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology.

“We will begin by examining the operations underneath memory formation in the living, behaving brain. Our novel approach, however, is to extend from the brain to physical materials. More specifically, through the soft matter physics expertise in our team, we will chart out a general framework for memory storage and retrieval aimed at replicating key biological findings, such as the interaction between short-term and longer-term memories. Materials that extract and store information, such as driven suspensions, can be arranged in a flexibly interacting network to serve as a physical model of brain networks.”

More information at Understanding memory through materials: a new HFSP project at SISSA.

We collaborate with other Groups in SISSA, including the Theory of neural networks Group led by Sebastian Goldt and the Neural Computation Lab led by Eugenio Piasini.

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