The Rice Neuroscience Program is a composition of courses, research opportunities, and seminars that seek to provide an education experience that can lead to exciting and rewarding career paths directly in, or related to, neuroscience.

Currently, we have a neuroscience minor program that is an official part of the Rice curriculum, which involves participation in core and elective courses at Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center as well as research in active faculty laboratories throughout the Texas Medical Center.  The Neuroscience Program is in a state of growth, with working efforts to build a shared graduate degree in Neuroscience, and next, a neuroscience major at Rice.

Web Information

Rice Neuroscience Program website: http://neuroscience.rice.edu/ NSF Grant – “Identifying Design Principles of Neural Cells“

Contact Information

Email:  neuroscience@rice.edu Address: Rice University, MS-543 Attn: Neuroscience Administrator 6100 Main Street Houston, TX 77005

About the Rice Neuroscience Program

Neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system; how it develops, how it works, and what happens when it doesn’t work properly.  Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary field that encompasses most areas of modern science, from genetics and biology, to mathematics and engineering, to social and physical sciences, to medicine.  Progress in neuroscience research has ...

Principal Investigators: Behnaam Aazhang, PhD – Rice and Nitin Tandon, MD – UT Health Title: Micro-scale Real-time Decoding and Closed-loop Modulation of Human Language BRAIN Category: Neuroengineering and Brain-inspired concepts and design

The engineering objective is to develop biocompatible microchips to vastly enhance our insight into language and other cognitive processes and learning. Miniaturized microchips in silicon technology will be developed that can record neural signals, digitize them, and transmit the signals to an in vitro receiver wirelessly.

Abstract

Award Number: #1533688

Humans produce language, which is a defining characteristic of our species and our civilization. We can select words precisely out of a large lexicon with remarkably low error rates. It is perhaps not surprising that this complex speech production system is easily affected by disease. Brain damage induced language disorders affect millions of Americans, and there is little hope of remediation. Research on the anatomical, physiological, and computational bases of speech production has made important strides in recent years but this has been limited by a glaring lack of information on the dynamics of the process. This limitation results from the low spatio-temporal resolution of the available tools to collect data and the effectiveness of the current tools for analysis. Our driving vision ...

Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, Dept. of  Bioengineering Principal Investigator, Qutub Lab

Amina Qutub’s research at Rice University integrates biological systems theory and design to characterize hypoxic response signaling and neurovascular dynamics. Her basic and translational research has applications in leukemia and brain cancer therapy; treatments for brain ischemia and Alzheimer’s disease; and increased understanding of cellular and sub-cellular organization in vascular biology.

Web Information

Department webpage: bioengineering.rice.edu/faculty/Amina_Qutub.aspx

Qutub Lab website: qutublab.rice.edu/index.html

Rice Neuroscience: brain2015.onair.cc/rice-neuroscience/

Contact Information

Email: amina@rice.edu

Phone: (713) 348-8089

Address: Department of Bioengineering 6500 Main Street, Suite 135 Houston, Texas 77030

Biography

Qutub is a principal investigator on a National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) grant with Rice bioengineering collaborators to build multiscale computer models of blood vessel growth from image-based molecular analyses. Also, through a 2011 Hamill Innovation Award from Rice’s Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering, she is furthering this work through joint research that characterizes the coupling between angiogenic signaling and cyto-mechanical responses. Qutub earned a 2012 NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) award to study neurovasculature formation, integrating computation with experiments to measure and predict patterns in individual cell behavior during angiogenesis. The research, which focuses on cellular developments in the blood-brain barrier, will address unanswered questions about how cell-cell and cell-protein interactions ...

J.S. Abercrombie Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University Director, Rice Center for Neuroengineering Founding Director, Center for Multimedia Communication

Dr. Aazhang focuses on communication theory, information theory, and their applications to wireless communication with a focus on the interplay of communication systems and networks; including network coding, user cooperation, spectrum sharing, and opportunistic access.

Web Information

Department webpage: ece.rice.edu/aaz.aspx

Center for Neuroengineering website:  neuroengineering.rice.edu/

Wikipedia entry: wikipedia.org/wiki/Behnaam_Aazhang

Contact Information

Email: aaz@rice.edu

Phone: 713-348-4749

Address: Duncan Hall 2017

Biography

Behnaam Aazhang received his B.S. (with highest honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively.

From 1981-1985, he was a Research Assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois.  In August 1985, he joined the faculty of Rice University, Houston, Texas, where he is now the J.S. Abercrombie Professor and Director of the Cluster on Neuroengineering within the Gulf Coast Consortium, a multi-university research center in Houston, Texas. In addition, he holds an Academy of Finland Distinguished Visiting Professorship appointment (FiDiPro) at the Center for Wireless Communication (CWC) in the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland. He served as the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2004-2014. His research interests are ...