Principal investigators and associate members in the McGovern Institute conduct systems neuroscience research on all levels of the brain pertaining to perception, cognition, and action.

Their interests include the molecular and genetic foundations of neural activity, the processing of sensory, emotional, and motivational input, and their effects on behavior, and how the brain makes decisions and becomes conscious of its own activities. The faculty share the goal of translating their discoveries to applications that will improve the understanding and treatment of human brain diseases and mental illness. All McGovern faculty hold appointments in academic departments at MIT.

Principal Investigators and Their Research Interests

Emilio Bizzi: How the central nervous system translates brain messages signaling motor intent into muscle activity and movement?

Martha Constantine-Paton: How activity-dependent synaptic connections form in the developing central nervous system?

Robert Desimone: What brain mechanisms underlie attention, memory and executive control?

James DiCarlo: How the visual system processes object recognition?

Michale Fee: How the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors?

Ann Graybiel: How the neurophysiology of the limbic system controls movement and cognition, as well as our ability to learn habits?

Ki Ann Goosens: What brain mechanisms underlie fear memory and how stress modifies this memory?

H. Robert Horvitz: How genetic control functions in the nervous system and in the fate of cells and synapses?

Nancy Kanwisher: How brain imaging of human visual perception and cognition can identify the location of brain activity as we carry out visual tasks?

Christopher Moore: What brain dynamics are involved in touch perception and how they shape what we feel?

Tomaso Poggio: How to use computational neuroscience to understand the processes by which the brain learns to recognize and categorize visual objects?

Associate Members of the McGovern Institute

Ed Boyden: What new tools are needed for manipulating neural activity in order to understand brain function and treat human brain pathologies?

John D. E. Gabrieli: How are memory, thought, and emotion organized in the human brain, and how do disruption of that organization lead to neurological and psychiatric diseases?

Alan Jasanoff: How to develop a new generation of non-invasive functional imaging methods to study systems-level neural plasticity and the neuromechanics of behavior?