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Alan Jasanoff is an Associate Member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and an Associate Professor with a primary appointment in the Department of Biological Engineering and additional appointments with the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Nuclear Science and Engineering. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2004, he was a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. He received a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1998 from Harvard in the laboratory of Don Wiley, where he was supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute pre-doctoral fellowship. He also earned an M.Phil. in Chemistry at Cambridge University in 1993 and an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Harvard College in 1992. He was named a Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation Scholar in 2004, and he received a 2006 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award for developing methods to apply MRI calcium sensors for cellular-level functional imaging in living animals.
Alan Jasanoff’s laboratory is developing a new generation of brain scanning methods that will combine the specificity of cellular neuroscience with the noninvasiveness and whole-brain coverage of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The group focuses on generating MRI contrast agents that sense calcium and other molecules important for communication between and within neurons. Jasanoff’s overall goal is to apply the new agents for high-resolution analysis of the neural mechanisms of simple behavior in animals. The imaging methods may also be applied to animal analogs of cognition, and perhaps eventually to studies with human subjects. | 