ASD Researchers at UNC

Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Primary faculty, UNC Neuroscience Center and Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities

Dr. Anne Marion Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the UNC Neuroscience Center and Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.  Her lab focuses on examining changes that occur at mammalian synapses during development, with disease, and following Traumatic Brain Injury. They exploit micro-scale technology and microfluidics to overcome traditional challenges in working with cultured neurons. Their novel approaches are particularly relevant given the emerging use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to model disease. Human iPSCs are stem cells derived from patients’ skin cells that can be generated into functional neurons and then studied in culture; this model system allows them to investigate how human synapses are altered in disease. Her lab uses devices that allow access to distinct cellular compartments to investigate localized changes at synapses and signaling from synapse-to-nucleus.  They also exploit the scalability of these approaches—a unique advantage given low-throughput approaches of traditional techniques in neuroscience.