Dr. Solange Brown, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, has been selected as the recipient of the 2022 Hamilton Smith Award for Innovative Research in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Science (IBBS) at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.
The Hamilton Smith award recognizes and advances innovative research by early career faculty members in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences by providing them with funding to pursue their most creative ideas.
Dr. Brown’s research focuses on the development and function of neural circuits and the behaviors that they control in the mammalian brain. Dr. Brown and her students have defined the cellular and circuit organization of layer 6 of the cerebral cortex, showing how inhibitory interneurons integrate thalamic and local synaptic inputs. More recently, the Brown laboratory has shown, by recording neural activity and by chemogenetic silencing in awake and behaving mice, that the claustrum, a subcortical nucleus with extensive connections to the neocortex, plays an important role in selecting appropriate motor actions.