Jyun-you Liou, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, is the recipient of a Mentored Research Training Grant from the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER) for his proposal, “Discovering neuronal firing patterns underlying anesthetic-induced slow waves.”
The two-year, $250,000 grant will fund Dr. Liou’s research which aims to compare slow waves induced by anesthetics with those that occur during sleep to gain a better understanding of anesthetic-induced brain states.
“Although anesthesiologists often explain general anesthesia as ‘going to sleep’ to patients, how similar the two brain states are remains highly controversial,” said Dr. Liou. His research will employ state-of-the-art electrophysiological and optical methods to compare sleep and anesthesia-associated neuronal firing patterns to provide high-resolution pictures to answer this question.
Dr. Liou is a Van Poznak Anesthesiology Research Scholar in the Department of Anesthesiology. His faculty mentors are: Dr. Alipasha Vaziri, professor of neurosciences and behavior at Rockefeller University and Dr. Hugh Hemmings, Jr., the Joseph F. Artusio, Jr. Professor and chair of anesthesiology, and senior associate dean for research at Weill Cornell Medicine. He collaborates on this research with Drs. Hui Fang, and Conor Liston.
FAER's mission is to advance medicine through anesthesia research and education. The Mentored Research Training Grants help anesthesiologists develop the skills, preliminary data for subsequent grant applications and research publications needed to become independent investigators.