Title
Professor

Department
Dept of Psychology
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute


Faculty URL
https://psychology.berkeley.edu/people/joni-wallis

Research Group
http://www.wallislab.org

Email
wallis@berkeley.edu


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Research Expertise and Interest
prefrontal cortex, neurophysiology, executive control, decision making

Research Description
Neuropsychiatric disease is one of the most costly health burdens on modern societies. Pharmaceutical therapies have limited efficacy and drug companies are no longer pursuing research in this field due to the poor prospects for success. A fundamental problem is that neuropsychiatric disorders often involve very specific associations. For example, post-traumatic stress disorder can involve a single traumatic event. Pharmaceutical treatments lack the specificity to target the representation of specific associations in the brain. Wallis Lab's approach is to treat the brain as a complex computing device. A major goal of their research is the development of brain implants that can interact with the brain in order to treat neuropsychiatric disease. They accomplish this through high-channel count neurophysiological recordings, sophisticated algorithms for decoding neuronal information in real-time and closed-loop control of brain stimulation. In this way, they can develop devices that can detect and disrupt maladaptive associations and behaviors and restore the brain to the healthy state.