Jerome Sanes, professor of neuroscience, and Paul Williard, professor of chemistry, have won Fulbright Scholar Awards to conduct research in France, according to a Feb. 27 University press release.
“It was a wonderful opportunity,” said Sanes, who will study Parkinson’s disease at the Brain and Spinal Cord Institute, which is affiliated with the University of Paris.
Sanes will spend the year looking at “the cognitive flexibility in patients with Parkinson’s disease” with colleagues in Paris, he said.
“The type of research that we and others do with patients” tries “to understand something fundamental about the disease,” Sanes said.
The research will focus on a phenomenon Sanes calls “internal changes of mind,” which can be driven by sensory stimuli or changes in a person’s memory or thought process. “There is nothing evident that is driving” these changes, he said.
“You’re walking around on campus, and all of a sudden, instead of walking straight you turn right, and there’s no evident reason why you did that,” Sanes said. “There’s some sort of internal event happening.”
People with Parkinson’s disease have cells in their brains that project dopamine into the motor stream, and Sanes and his team believe “that these people have some difficulty in cognitive processing,” Sanes said.
Sanes hopes the study will find a way to offer “therapeutic benefits” to patients with Parkinson’s disease, especially through noninvasive brain stimuli.
Williard will spend six months working at the University of Rouen in Mont-Saint-Aignan, France. He will use nuclear magnetic resonance to determine the structure and interactions of molecules and solutions.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” Williard said. “These Fulbright fellowships are not trivial, so I didn’t anticipate one way or another.”
Potential applications of the study are wide-ranging, and include screening libraries of potential drugs to see which of the molecules will bind to their biological targets and turning carbon dioxide into a fuel source.
The fact that Williard and Sanes both ended up in France, despite their different focuses, is “quite unusual,” Williard said, adding that he and Sanes have previously discussed collaborating at the University on imaging, a technique they both use for their research.
The Fulbright grant is a part of a program initiated by the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Approximately 8,000 individuals receive Fulbright grants each year, including undergraduates, graduate students, professors and professionals in a variety of fields, according to the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ website.
To apply for a Fulbright grant, a professor must find a “collaborator in a foreign country and a background for suitability to that foreign country,” Williard said.
While students must apply for Fulbright grants through the University, faculty members apply through the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, said Linda Dunleavy, associate dean of the College for fellowships.
The University is known for producing large numbers of both student and faculty Fulbright recipients — Brown ranked third among research universities in the number of Fulbright grants awarded in 2012, according to a report published by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
A Fulbright grant is an “award that supports independent thinking and willingness to explore,” Dunleavy said, noting that she often sees these traits in students.
“Perhaps the same could be said about the faculty,” she added. “The overall campus environment encourages people to leave the University and explore.”
