UC San Diego hires two top neuroscientists

EDUCATION

UC San Diego has hired a pair of prominent brain scientists who are expected to shift at least $20 million in research funding to the La Jolla campus, which operates one of the world’s top-ranked neuroscience programs.

The university lured Scott Sternson and Loren Looger away from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia campus near Ashburn, Virginia, where scientists create new ways at looking at brain activity in real-time.

Looger and Sternson, who are both 46, are HHMI investigators, an elite group of scientists known for taking on unusually difficult problems, especially the workings of the brain. More than a dozen current HHMI investigators are Nobel laureates, including Susumu Tonegawa, a UCSD graduate.

Sternson works in an area that is of broad interest to the public. He explores how the brain controls appetite, honing in on such things as hunger, thirst and stress. Sternson says his work could eventually lead to better treatments for obesity and for other neurological disorders.

The Janelia website says that Looger likes to engineer biosensors “that can be used in living organisms and cells. The sensors will sit inside cells looking for specific chemicals, such as metabolites or neurotransmitters.

“When the biosensor encounters those chemicals, it will transmit a signal that can be observed with an instrument. He envisions using this approach to build glutamate, dopamine, GABA, and serotonin sensors, which could be deployed simultaneously inside neurons and provide researchers a wealth of new information about how neurotransmitters work.”

Such work helps to reveal how the brain works, and how it goes awry, giving rise to diseases and movement disorders.

“Both of these scientists are stars. We were lucky to get them,” said Dr. David Brenner, UCSD’S vice chancellor of health sciences.

UCSD has one of the largest neuroscience programs in the world, and it is especially well-known for the work it has done on Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, autism and schizophrenia.