CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE NEUROSCIENCE - Key Persons
Christoph E. Schreiner, MD, PhD, is Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS), and Bioengineering&Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his master degree and PhD degree, both in physics, from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Schreiner completed a medical degree from the University of Göttingen, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany, followed by a neuroscience research fellowship at UCSF.
Job Titles:
- Asst Professor in Residence Psychiatry
Dr. Alexandra Nelson is a neurologist who cares for patients with disorders that affect both movement and cognition, such as Huntington's disease, spinocerebellar ataxia and atypical parkinsonism. She also works closely with her patients' families. She is a member of the clinical and research team at UCSF's Memory and Aging Center and Huntington's Disease Clinic, designated a center of excellence by the Huntington's Disease Society of America.
Dr. Edward Chang is a neurosurgeon who treats patients with epilepsy, brain tumors, and cranial nerve nerve compression syndromes such as trigeminal neuralgia and hemifacial spasm. He is Chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF.
Dr Chang specializes in advanced brain mapping methods to preserve crucial areas for speech and motor functions in the brain. He also has extensive experience with implantable devices that stimulate specific nerves to relieve seizure, movement, pain and other disorders.
Howard Fields received his MD and PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford in 1965-66. After Internal Medicine training at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he spent three years as a research neurologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Following clinical training in neurology at the Boston City Hospital Service of Harvard Medical School in 1972, he joined the faculty of the University of California San Francisco. Fields major interests are in nervous system mechanisms of pain and substance abuse with a focus on how endogenous opioids contribute to these mechanisms. He was a founder of the UCSF pain management center and has made major contributions to understanding and treating neuropathic pain. His group was the first to demonstrate the clinical effectiveness of opioids for neuropathic pain and of topical lidocaine for post-herpetic neuralgia. In laboratory studies he discovered and elucidated a pain modulating neural circuit that is required for opioids to produce analgesia. He also discovered that placebo analgesia is blocked by an opioid antagonist. Recently, his laboratory has discovered nerve cells in the striatum that selectively encode the magnitude of a reward. They have also shown how the neurotransmitter dopamine contributes to motivation and reward based choice. Current work is focused on the neurobiology of opioid reward.
Josh Berke's laboratory at UCSF investigates brain mechanisms involved in learning, motivation and decision-making, and how these mechanisms go awry in disorders such as drug addiction, Parkinson's Disease and Huntington's Disease. (see www.berkelab.org). He is also Director of the Alcohol and Addiction Research Group, and holds the Rudi Schmid Distinguished Professorship in Neurology.
Job Titles:
- Operations Analyst
- Administration
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus at UCSF
Philip Sabes is a Professor Emeritus at UCSF and a neurotechnology startup founder.
Dr. Sabes received his PhD from MIT in machine learning and human motor control. He did his postdoctoral research in neurophysiology at Caltech and the Salk Institute, before joining the UCSF Department of Physiology in 2000. At UCSF, Dr. Sabes' lab studied neural computations for movement control and developed novel tools for interfacing with the primate brain.
The Sabes Lab studied how sensory and motor experience shapes movement control and the underlying brain circuits. For example, the lab showed that visual and somatosensory feedback are flexibly and adaptively combined within individual computations, enabling more precise limb movement (Sober and Sabes, 2003 & 2005). The lab then showed how this kind of flexible information flow can explain the complex sensorimotor representations seen in the primate cortex (McGuire and Sabes, 2009). They also showed how these representations are continually changing -- incorporating the statistics of recent movements to optimize the next movement (Verstynen and Sabes, 2011; Cheng and Sabes, 2006). The lab demonstrated that non-human primates can learn to use entirely novel, artificial sensory feedback as if it were a natural sensory signal. Specifically, the primates learned to interpret electrical microstimulation as multidimensional feedback about limb position. These results have clear application in delivering artificial sensory feedback via a Brain Machine Interface (Dadarlat, O'Doherty and Sabes, 2015).
Dr. Sohal directs a neuroscience laboratory that investigates the brain circuits underlying fundamental aspects of cognition and emotion. His laboratory has made important discoveries about the role of rhythmic patterns of brain activity called gamma oscillations in normal cognition and schizophrenia, and about how other rhythmic patterns of brain activity encode changes in emotional states. Dr. Sohal is also a board-certified psychiatrist who supervises residents in the Early Psychosis (PATH) clinic.