Dr. Carmen Varela, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Jupiter Life Science Initiative faculty member, has recently been awarded a $75,000 research grant from the
Whitehall Foundation.
The Whitehall Foundation, whose headquarters are located in Palm Beach, supports basic research to study the neural mechanisms of behavior. These grants are fairly competitive and prestigious. This grant is the first that the Varela lab has received since joining Florida Atlantic University and the research group located on the Jupiter campus.
The research grant was awarded for a project entitled "Thalamocortical Dynamics Underlying Flexible Memory Consolidation." The goal of this project is to determine the cellular underpinnings of the influence of sleep on learning and memory. Our brain continues to process our everyday memories after they are initially formed, and resting states such as sleep are thought to have an important role to the reorganization and stabilization of our memories. With this project we will study the precise coordination of cellular activity during sleep to try to understand how sleep activity may ensure that recently formed memories do not fade away, and that instead, they are processed to remain stable but flexible, so organisms can continue to learn and build upon them. Our laboratory will use state-of-the-art recording techniques to track cellular brain activity in rodents with high precision; and these experiments will thus shed light on the cellular underpinnings of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and the role of sleep on adaptive behavior and learning.
