Principal investigators and associate members in the McGovern Institute conduct systems neuroscience research on all levels of the brain pertaining to perception, cognition, and action.

Their interests include the molecular and genetic foundations of neural activity, the processing of sensory, emotional, and motivational input, and their effects on behavior, and how the brain makes decisions and becomes conscious of its own activities. The faculty share the goal of translating their discoveries to applications that will improve the understanding and treatment of human brain diseases and mental illness. All McGovern faculty hold appointments in academic departments at MIT.

Principal Investigators and Their Research Interests

Emilio Bizzi: how the central nervous system translates brain messages signaling motor intent into muscle activity and movement

Martha Constantine-Paton: how activity-dependent synaptic connections form in the developing central nervous system

Robert Desimone: what brain mechanisms underlie attention, memory and executive control

James DiCarlo: how the visual system processes object recognition

Michale Fee: how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors

Ki Ann Goosens: what brain mechanisms underlie fear memory and how stress modifies this memory

Ann Graybiel: how the neurophysiology of the limbic system controls movement and cognition, as well as our ability to learn habits

H. Robert Horvitz: how genetic control functions in the nervous system and in the fate of cells and synapses

Nancy Kanwisher: how brain imaging of human visual perception and cognition can identify the location of brain activity as we carry out visual tasks

Christopher Moore: what brain dynamics are involved in touch perception and how they shape what we feel

Tomaso Poggio: how to use computational neuroscience to understand the processes by which the brain learns to recognize and categorize visual objects

Associate Members of the McGovern Institute

Thomas Byrne: what are the clinical aspects of cancer involving the nervous system, including both primary brain tumors and the neurological complications of cancer and anticancer therapies

John D. E. Gabrieli: how are memory, thought, and emotion organized in the human brain, and how disruption of that organization leads to neurological and psychiatric diseases

Alan Jasanoff: how to develop a new generation of non-invasive functional imaging methods to study systems-level neural plasticity and the neuromechanics of behavior