Prof. Shantanu Jadhav (PSYC) was named one of the 126 Sloan Research Fellows of 2015 and was awarded a $50,000 grant to explore memory and decision-making processes in mammalian brains.

According to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s website, the fellowships seek to “stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.”

The fellowships last for two years and are awarded yearly to researchers in a variety of scientific fields, according to the website. The foundation has awarded the fellowships since 1955, and past fellows include 42 Nobel Prize winners.

According to Jadhav’s website, studying specific parts of the brain can unlock crucial information toward the understanding and treatment of many neurological disorders, including diseases such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

“The hippocampus is known to be critical for episodic memories, and the prefrontal cortex is involved in executive control, working memory and decision making,” his website notes. “It is critical to understand how these two regions act in concert to support learning, form memories, make decisions and guide behavior.”

Understanding how the two sections work together “will provide a crucial basis for addressing the numerous neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders involving these two regions, such as Alzheimers, demetia, [sic] depression and schizophrenia,” the website states.

To explore the question of how the two regions interact, Jadhav studies rat brains as they form memories and make decisions and then observes how “activity in neuronal groups in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex evolves during learning and what mechanisms underlie the organization and transmission of information across these structures,” according to a Feb. 25 BrandeisNOW article.

“The brain has a remarkable capacity to learn and to use past experience to guide our daily behavior,” Jadhav’s life sciences faculty profile reads. “Multiple brain regions coordinate activity to form representations of the external world, learn new experiences, store and retrieve memories, and make decisions. We are interested in understanding the neural basis of these cognitive abilities by studying processing at the cellular and network level in the neuronal circuits of the rodent brain.”

The profile also notes that Jadhav’s previous research has shown some coordination between the two regions, which provides the basis for the research he will do during his fellowship.

“We have shown that hippocampal replay during awake sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) is critical for spatial memory, and SWRs are associated with coordinated reactivation of hippocampal-prefrontal neurons during memory-guided decision making,” his profile says. “This approach thus allows us to characterize the neurophysiological basis of prefrontal-hippocampal interactions, and also to provide causal evidence linking specific forms of neural activity to behavior and cognition.”

Prior to joining the Brandeis faculty, Jadhav was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and was also the winner of the 2013 Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience.