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Air Pollution and Brain Health: What You Need to Know

Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Air pollution is back in the spotlight because of more frequent wildfires and also efforts to roll back air quality regulations in the U.S. and around the world. At University of Rochester Medicine, researchers are helping to show why this matters not only for your lungs but also for your brain.

“Air pollution is a global threat,” said Marissa Sobolewski, PhD, associate professor of Environmental Medicine and Neuroscience. “Its effects are broader than many people realize.”

How Air Pollution Affects the Brain

Air pollution has mainly been viewed as a lung and heart problem, but new research shows it can also affect brain health. It may contribute to problems ranging from learning difficulties to dementia.

URochester Medicine researchers have long been part of the foundational work showing that very small airborne particles can reach the brain. These tiny particles, called ultrafine particles, are so small that they can move from the nose or lungs into the brain and other parts of the body.

Experts say the danger is not tied to just one disease. Instead, air pollution appears to act as a broad risk factor that can worsen both developmental and degenerative brain disorders.

“In many ways, there’s a shared trigger,” said URochester Medicine researcher Alison Elder, PhD. “Inflammation and oxidative stress may be part of the reason that pollution has such broad effects.”

From Dish to Brain: Researchers Chart Human Glial Cell Maturation

Thursday, May 28, 2026

A new study published in Nature Communications shows that human glial progenitor cells are a promising and safe cell product for transplantation. The research also defines the transcriptional and epigenetic signatures of these cells as they mature into astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, two essential support cell types in the brain.

“We believe that glia are particularly divergent compared to other species,” said lead study author John Mariani, PhD, a neuroscientist with University of Rochester Medicine and the first author of the new paper. “For this study, we grow these cells in vitro, and then we transplant them. We wanted to know what they look like before we transplant them and what they look like after. This sets the stage for long-term manipulation of these cells to engraft better, to respond better to the cues, and understand this process better, since it is an approach we are pursuing for cell therapies.”

This transplantation model may have implications for disorders such as multiple sclerosis, leukodystrophies, and Huntington’s disease, in which myelination, the insulating process that helps nerve cells communicate efficiently, is disrupted.

Congratulations to our NGP students

Thursday, April 16, 2026

Exciting award recognitions!!!

• Aaron Huynh was selected as a recipient of the 2026 University of Rochester Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student
• Lia Calcines-Rodriguez was selected to receive the 2026 Joan Wright Goodman Dissertation Fellowship
• Estephanie Balbuena was selected as a 2026-27 recipient of an American Association of University Women (AAUW) fellowship

Successful recent dissertation!!!

• Michael Duhain, PhD - Vibrotactile feature encoding in distinct neuronal subtypes of primary somatosensory cortex
• Sarah Yablonski, PhD - The Role of MAP2K4 and MAP2K7 in Glaucoma-Relevant Retinal Ganglion Cell Death
• Paige Nicklas, PhD - Movin’ & Groovin’: Characterizing Cognitive-Motor Interactions in Children and Young Adults with and without an Autism Spectrum Diagnosis using Mobile Brain-Body Imaging
• Dennisha King, PhD - The role of microglia in shaping neural development in the macaque amygdal

Please congratulate one and all for jobs well done and for showcasing the exemplary work in NGP at the University of Rochester.

Learning makes brain cells work together, not apart

Thursday, March 5, 2026

New URochester research challenges a longstanding theory in neuroscience and could reshape how scientists think about perception, learning disorders, and artificial intelligence. The study was led by the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ Ralf Haefner, an associate professor, Adam Snyder, an assistant professor, and graduate student Shizhao Liu.

When you get better at a skill—recognizing a familiar face in a crowd, spotting a typo at a glance, or anticipating the next move in a game—sensory neurons in your brain become more coordinated, sharing information rather than acting more independently. That’s the conclusion of a new study by researchers at the University of Rochester and its Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, published in Science, which challenges a long-held assumption in neuroscience that learning improves efficiency by minimizing repetition across neural signals.

Led by Shizhao Liu, a graduate student in the labs of Ralf Haefner and Adam Snyder, both faculty members in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the study shows that learning instead increases shared activity among neurons. The findings could provide insights into learning disorders and inspire more flexible, human-like artificial intelligence tools.

“The dominant view in neuroscience has been that learning makes the brain more efficient by pushing neurons to act more independently, so information can be read out more cleanly,” Liu says. “Our results support a different idea, that sensory areas of the brain aren’t just passively encoding the world. They’re actively performing inference by combining what’s coming in with what the brain has learned to expect.”

Frequently Distracted? Science Says, Blame It on Your Brain Rhythms

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Scientists may have new answers to why pop-ups or notifications grab our attention. Turns out our attention is on a cycle, shifting seven to ten times per second. This rhythmic occurrence may be crucial for survival, as it prevents us from becoming overly focused on one thing in our environment. It could help us to see a car backing up in a parking lot while we search for where we parked, or to duck to avoid a low-hanging tree branch on a walk while watching a kid ride a bike. But these windows that shift our attention could also make us more susceptible to distractions, especially in modern times. As we live in a world surrounded by screens, digital alerts, and other visual stimuli, these frequent and innate windows for shifting attention may make it easier to be pulled away from a task.

“For our ancestors who had to continue to monitor the environment for predators while foraging for food, this was a beneficial trait,” said Ian Fiebelkorn, PhD, assistant professor of Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and senior author of a study out in the journal PLOS Biology. “But in our modern environment, with laptops open in front of us and a smartphone nearby, rhythmically occurring windows for beneficial attentional shifts might also work against us. That is, rhythmically occurring windows for attentional shifts are also associated with increased susceptibility to distracting information.”

"The brain uses eye movements to see in 3D"

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Contrary to long-standing beliefs, motion from eye movements helps the brain perceive depth—a finding that could enhance virtual reality.

When you go for a walk, how does your brain know the difference between a parked car and a moving car? This seemingly simple distinction is challenging because eye movements, such as the ones we make when watching a car pass by, make even stationary objects move across the retina—motion that has long been thought of as visual “noise” the brain must subtract out.

Now, researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered that instead of being meaningless interference, the visual motion of an image caused by eye movements helps us understand the world. The specific patterns of visual motion created by eye movements are useful to the brain for figuring out how objects move and where they are located in 3D space.

“The conventional idea has been that the brain needs to somehow discount, or subtract off, the image motion that is produced by eye movements, as this motion has been thought to be a nuisance,” says Greg DeAngelis, George Eastman Professor; professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Visual Science; member of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience; and lead author of the new research, published in Nature Communications. “But we found that the visual motion produced by our eye movements is not just a nuisance variable to be subtracted off; rather, our brains analyze these global patterns of image motion and use this to infer how our eyes have moved relative to the world.”

Why is sleep so important? Your brain depends on it

Monday, January 26, 2026