Eleven HBI faculty members were recently awarded HBI Bipolar Disorder Seed Grants! The Harvard Brain Science Initiative (HBI) Bipolar Disorder Seed Grant Program supports research relevant to the basic understanding and eventual treatment of bipolar disorder. Supported by a generous gift from Kent and Liz Dauten and the Dauten Family Foundation, this program funds innovative, visionary projects with new ideas and approaches that otherwise may not attract seed funding from conventional sources. To date the program has awarded 30 grants totaling $3M, to laboratories with diverse areas of expertise, spread out across different campuses of Harvard University and its affiliated hospital.

Mark Andermann, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Modeling Mental Imagery in Bipolar Disorder:
Effects of dopamine on ongoing patterns of cortical activity

Todd Anthony, Boston Children’s Hospital
Connecting candidate bipolar disorder genetic risk factors to neural circuit-level phenotypes   

Joan A. Camprodon, Mass General Hospital and
Kerry J. Ressler, McLean Hospital
Structural plasticity underlying anhedonia in bipolar disorder treatment with electroconvulsive therapy

Michael Tri H. Do, Boston Children’s Hospital
A Circadian Control System for Counterbalancing Bipolar Disorder

Susan Dymecki, Harvard Medical School
Understanding the role of serotonergic neurons in bipolar disorder circuitry

Bernardo Sabatini, Harvard Medical School
Elucidating the role of distinct cell types of the dorsal raphe nucleus in bipolar disorder

Beth Stevens, Boston Children’s Hospital
High-content, super-resolution synapse analysis in human prefrontal cortex

Naoshige Uchida, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Competition between multiple dopamine systems as a model of bipolar disorders

Charles J. Weitz, Harvard Medical School
Cytoplasmic circadian clock complexes in mammals:
Could they be autonomous post-translational oscillators?

Tracy Young-Pearse, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Targeting Bipolar Disorder Genes in Human Neurons in a Dish