March 28, 2007                                                        

SIU Med School Receives NIH Grant to Study Brain Neurons

A faculty member at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield has been awarded a five-year federal grant from the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to study the function of neurons in the brain.  The grant with a budget of $942,072 is a subcontract of a grant awarded to the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign (UIUC).    

The study will try to understand how learning and memory work.  Nerve cells in rodent brains will be examined to identify patterns or connections that link neurons and to determine whether the neurons can be engineered like a circuit board to form useful patterns and connections.  This study may eventually lead to potential new treatments for memory problems in humans as well as develop better computers and teaching methods.

Gregory J. Brewer, Ph.D., professor of medical microbiology, immunology and cell biology, is the principal investigator for the SIU portion of the grant.  Bruce Wheeler, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering at UIUC, is the principal investigator of the overall project.

Brewer’s research has received funding for 30 years from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and now totals more than $4.3 million.  His previous research has focused on two- and three-dimensional neural networks and how aging contributes to Alzheimer’s disease.  

Brewer joined the SIU faculty in 1980.  He earned his doctorate at the University of San Diego in La Jolla, Calif. (1972) and his bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (1968).  Brewer was the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972-74).

-30-