Grant: Operating Grant

Years before you can play a Mozart Sonata on the piano, your brain has already developed into a structure that has the capacity to acquire new motor skills for the rest of your life. Playing the piano, and other motor skills, involves the cerebellum, or "little brain" at the base of the brain. Diseases of the cerebellum, like ataxia, lead to devastating motor impairments. My research focuses on how the cerebellum develops. We hope that by the understanding we gain of cerebellar development may help us to uncover what goes wrong in cerebellar disorders and even eventually how to treat or prevent them. Early in the developing brain, patterns of activity that resemble waves have been observed across many different brain structures. These early waves have been best studied in the visual parts of the brain, where they have been shown to be important for visual brain regions to develop properly. My recent work has identified early waves of activity in the developing cerebellum, which are similar to waves seen in other brain regions. We are now undertaking a deeper study of these waves, to learn more about when and where they are found, and what mechanisms turn them on and off in the developing cerebellum. Finally, we will block these early waves to directly test what their function is in development. Results from this research will give us insight into how early waves function in non-visual brain regions, which will tell us if wave function is conserved across the developing nervous system, and thus will have impact for other brain regions as well. Furthermore, we expect that this work will give us insights into the problems underlying cerebellar diseases, and may ultimately lead to new strategies for their treatment or prevention.