Adam Charles earns NSF CAREER award to study the brain’s complex architecture

Adam Charles, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has earned a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The highly competitive CAREER award recognizes early-career faculty who successfully combine research with mentoring and education. 

Charles is receiving $718,681 over the next five years to further his work on developing a brain-wide framework for understanding cognition and behavior. 

The brain’s complex intelligence emerges from the interaction of multiple systems. Previous research has analyzed brain activity based on anatomical areas of the brain; however, emerging evidence suggests that brain activity coordination is not strictly bound by anatomical structures. Instead, the brain operates through a functional architecture that enables computations across its anatomical hardware. 

The grant will support Charles and his lab as they develop new models specifically designed to explore these brain-wide computations. By doing so, the researchers hope to uncover how these circuits allow the brain to flexibly process information and adapt, ultimately producing the robust intelligence that drives behavior. 

Faculty members in the Department of Biomedical Engineering who have recently earned CAREER awards include Jeremias Sulam, Jamie Spangler, Nicholas Durr, and Jean Fan.