Erica Jung receives NSF CAREER Award to investigate brain reprogramming
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Assistant Professor Erica Jung received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for her work investigating how neurons in the brain function to help find ways to treat brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Jung’s work is titled “CAREER: Identical Brains in Two Zebrafish: Optical Programming and Replication of Brains.”
The CAREER Award is one of the NSF’s most prestigious awards. It supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to advance the mission of their department.
With the $600,000 award, Jung will investigate zebrafish brains that are not functioning correctly and gain an understanding of how to manipulate and reprogram the brains.
She wants to understand the fundamentals of how neurons work and how she can change the neural network from a mechanical engineering perspective.
“I want to develop the system and method to reprogram the brain at the early stage and eventually apply it to humans,” said Jung, director of the Biomicrosystems Laboratory at UIC. “The ultimate goal is to find a link between what I observe in the zebrafish and find a way to apply it to the human brain to prevent or mitigate brain disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.”
When zebrafish are in the larvae stage, the brain sets the structure and the functional connections. In addition, the bodies and brains of zebrafish are nearly transparent, allowing her to observe brain activity. During this stage, Jung plans to interfere with brain development using light as a stimulation tool to see if she can program it.
For example, if she triggers a light-activated sensor, like an optogenetic actuator, in an appetite-controlling neuron, it will immediately feel hungry even if the fish is not hungry.
“It’s like turning on a light switch in the brain,” she said. “By doing this process in an early stage of the brain, I want to see if I can reprogram it. If it has a brain disorder, I want to see if I take the healthy signal from the normal brain and translate that to the dysfunctional brain to see if I can reprogram this malfunction and improve it using this light switch.”
As a mechanical engineer, she believes she can look at this research through a different lens to provide a different mindset from other scientists.
“It’s going to be interesting. There are no barriers to solving any problem, especially a big one,” she said. “I’m very excited to be conducting research in this area and gaining an understanding of the most complex organ in humans.”
Jung joined MIE in 2018. She received a BS in mechanical engineering from Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea in 2006. She obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea in 2008. She earned her PhD in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 2013.
Jung is the eighth MIE faculty member to receive the CAREER award. She joins associate professors Myunghee Kim, Sushant Anand, Patrick Lynch, Hamed Hatami-Marbini, Carmen Lilley, Mohammad Ghashami, and Professor Arunkumar Subramanian in this prestigious honor.