CNE and ESM are happy to announce that Patrick Drew has accepted our offer and will start his appointment at Penn State on June 15, 2010, as a member of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Neurosurgery, and the Center for Neural Engineering.

Patrick Drew received his BS in Biology from Caltech, and Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from Brandeis University. In addition to his work on the dynamics of the cortical microcirculation, he has published papers on sensory processing , plasticity in the somatosensory system and computational models of synaptic plasticity and learning.

My lab is interested in the relationship between neural activity and cerebral blood flow in the awake brain. We will use two-photon microscopy, intrinsic imaging and electrophysiology to understand the relationship between neural activity and changes in blood flow in awake, behaving mice.

We will use transgenic and knock-out mice to understand the signaling pathways that control cerebral blood flow and develop a better understanding of the relationship between neural activity and the signal from fMRI. A second area of interest is understanding the development, stability and plasticity in the cerebral vasculature. We would like to know how the vascular architecture is altered in response to long-term changes in neural activity. We hope to apply findings from this this research to diseases that have a cerebrovascular component.