Everything we experience, everything we remember, and everything we decide are ultimately functions of specific neural circuits in our brains.  Neurological or psychiatric diseases can disrupt these circuits, diminish our health, and deprive us of who we are.  Our ability to devise new treatment strategies for these diseases is held back by our fragmentary understanding of how these circuits normally function.  The goal of our department’s research is to provide this fundamental understanding.  We are at the dawn of a new era when powerful new molecular tools, imaging technologies, and computational approaches afford us the possibility of understanding the inner workings of the brain.  Our department is at the forefront of developing these new approaches and applying them to unravel the basic principles of the brain.  We investigate how our neural circuits form, how they function, and how they adapt. We study how neural circuits fail in disease and how they can be repaired. Success will provide the insights needed to treat the neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases that afflict us.