Brown professors earn neuroscience grants

PROVIDENCE – Two Brown University researchers have won five-year federal grants for neuroscience projects focused on brain development in infancy and early childhood, and on markers that could help identify bipolar disorder in children.
Sean Deoni, an assistant professor of engineering, is getting $2.5 million to use an MRI imaging technique he developed to look at the brains of children from 2 months to 5 years old.
Dr. Daniel Dickstein, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at The Warren Alpert Medical School and head of the Pediatric Mood, Imaging and Neurodevelopment (Pedi-MIND) program at Bradley Hospital, is getting $1.87 million for the bipolar disorder study, which aims to distinguish between full-blown and subsydromal manifestations.
Dickstein’s program also uses brain imaging, as well as behavioral tasks and genetic analyses.
Both grants are from the National Institute of Mental Health’s BRAINS program for innovative new scientists, which only gave out seven grants this year. &#8226