Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative (PNI)

Permanent URI for this collection

http://dspace.alquds.edu:4000/handle/20.500.12213/155

Overview

Since its inception in 2009, the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative at Al-Quds University aimed to establish infrastructure for neuroscience research in Palestine while training the next generation of scientists and conduct locally relevant and internationally significant research in neuroscience, neuropharmacology, neuropsychiatry, and neurogenetics. Over the past nine years, the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative has trained more than 150 Palestinian students and researchers at Al-Quds University, sent 40 researchers for advanced research training in Europe and the U.S., helped secure Ph.D. and clinical specialties in the U.S. and Europe for 15 researchers, helped more than 5000 Palestinian patients with psychiatric disorders, secured more than $2 million of funding for research in Palestine, and published 20 research papers in international journals.  Currently, there are six different research units under the umbrella of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative, including:

(1) the cognitive neuroscience unit,

(2) the behavioral neurogenetics unit,

(3) the developmental neuroscience unit,

(4) the molecular neuroscience unit,

(5) neurophysiology unit, and

(6) the computational neuroscience unit. There are 38 active researchers at the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative, including, 1 faculty member, 2 post-Ph.D. researchers, 3 Ph.D. researchers, 4 post-M.Sc. researchers, 4 M.Sc. students, 5 post-M.D. researchers, 3 post-B.Sc. researchers, and 16 medical students.

The Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative has ongoing partnerships with scientists at Rutgers, Harvard, NYU, Rockefeller, Northwell Health System and NIH in the U.S., and EPFL, SISSA, NTNU, Oxford, forschungszentrum Jülich, and TU-Berlin in Europe.  The main sponsors of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative are, in chronological order: Mr. Saad Mouasher, Dr. Samih Darwazah and Hikma Pharmaceuticals LLC., the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and Mr. Fadi Ghandour.  The Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative aims to create a powerhouse of neuroscience research in Palestine, train the next generation of Palestinian researchers and healthcare professionals, and create a viable research institution in Palestine to host Palestinian and other neuroscientists to pursue research careers in Palestine. 

 For more details about the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative, please visit our website at http://neuroscience.med.alquds.edu. 

Our Team

    • Mohammad Herzallah

    Ph.D.

    • Anfal AbuHilal

    Ph.D.

    Ashar Natsheh

    Ph.D.

    Aya Mousa

    Ph.D.

    Ayman Salman

    Ph.D.

    Hussein Khdour

    Ph.D.

    Juman Natsheh

    Ph.D.

    Nibal Khudeish

    Ph.D.

    Browse

    Browsing Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative (PNI) by Subject "Hippocampal region"

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      A neural model of hippocampalstriatal interactions in associative learningand transfer generalization in various neurological and psychiatric patients
      (Elsevier, 2010-08-21) Herzallah, Mohammed; Moustafa, Ahmed; Keri, Szabolcs; Myers, Catherine; Gluck, Mark
      Building on our previous neurocomputational models of basal ganglia and hippocampal region function (and their modulation by dopamine and acetylcholine, respectively), we show here how an integration of these models can inform our understanding of the interaction between the basal ganglia and hippocampal region in associative learning and transfer generalization across various patient populations. As a common test bed for exploring interactions between these brain regions and neuromodulators, we focus on the acquired equivalence task, an associative learning paradigm in which stimuli that have been associated with the same outcome acquire a functional similarity such that subsequent generalization between these stimuli increases. This task has been used to test cognitive dysfunction in various patient populations with damages to the hippocampal region and basal ganglia, including studies of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), schizophrenia, basal forebrain amnesia, and hippocampal atrophy. Simulation results show that damage to the hippocampal region—as in patients with hippocampal atrophy (HA), hypoxia, mild Alzheimer’s (AD), or schizophrenia—leads to intact associative learning but impaired transfer generalization performance. Moreover, the model demonstrates how PD and anterior communicating artery (ACoA) aneurysm—two very different brain disorders that affect different neural mechanisms— can have similar effects on acquired equivalence performance. In particular, the model shows that simulating a loss of dopamine function in the basal ganglia module (as in PD) leads to slow acquisition learning but intact transfer generalization. Similarly, the model shows that simulating the loss of acetylcholine in the hippocampal region (as in ACoA aneurysm) also results in slower acquisition learning. We argue from this that changes in associative learning of stimulus–action pathways (in the basal ganglia) or changes in the learning of stimulus representations (in the hippocampal region) can have similar functional effects.