Scott Laughlin
Stony Brook University, NY·Neuroscience
The brain's abilities come from how its cells are wired and how they interact: neurons connect at synapses, the junctions where they pass signals. Astrocytes are star-shaped support cells that also help tune and form those connections.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Chemistry
Biochemistry
- Topics
astrocytes
glia
synapses
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Develop pro-fluorescent lipid tracers, similar to DiI and DiO, that become fluorescent only after reacting with an activator, to label chosen neuron populations in fixed post-mortem brain tissue.
- Design a membrane-wide fluorescence activator that an antibody-targeted enzyme turns on only at synapses, using an enzyme-triggered ligation reaction to light up connected neurons for light microscopy.
- Characterize and expand a chemical astrocyte-targeting tag that steers molecules to astrocytes after whole-body delivery, testing labeling in larval zebrafish and mammalian astrocytes.
- Modify the astrocyte tag's structure to deliver fluorescent activity reporters, astrocyte-modulating drugs or transcription activators, and to label astrocytes that contact a given neuron's axon.
More about the research
Yet tools to see these connections are limited. Most methods for tracing circuits rely on living cells or genetic tools, so they cannot be used on preserved post-mortem tissue such as the human brain. Astrocytes and their contacts with neurons are even harder to see and control. Across two projects, the lab designs chemical probes, molecules built to label specific cells, to make these structures visible and controllable.
Why it matters
Abnormal brain wiring and faulty neuron–glia interactions play roles in neurological disease. Tools that reveal synapses in preserved human brain tissue could let researchers test whether circuit defects found in animal models also occur in human disease. Chemical tags that deliver drugs or gene switches to astrocytes could open new ways to study these cells and how they influence brain function.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jiakun Chen
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
Define how the phospholipid ligand for the Tre1/S1pr1 receptor is regulated in neurons versus astrocytes to direct astrocyte fine process outgrowth, using genetic, chemical and in vivo live-imaging approaches in zebrafish.
Adam S. Charles
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build and validate a two-photon microscope that combines one-dimensional blurring, random line sub-sampling and low-rank matrix completion reconstruction to image a large field of view at over 400 Hz, demonstrated with dense glutamate imaging in mice.
Maciej Stawikowski
Florida Atlantic University, FL·Chemistry
Design and synthesize environment-sensitive fluorescent cholesterol probes (CNDs) built on a 1,8-naphthalimide dye, using computational chemistry to tune their properties for different imaging uses.
The school
Stony Brook University: 32 labs on PI Pages, $319M a year on research, 289 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.