Federal Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded The Regents of the University of California, San Francisco a Project Grant totaling $117,747 under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to support research on neural computations underlying flexible behavioral control and problem-solving. The award, obligated on May 22, 2026, with a completion date of April 30, 2028, funds basic neuroscience research investigating how the brain implements strategy switching and adaptive decision-making—cognitive abilities that are often impaired in neuropsychiatric disorders including autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

The research deliverables include mechanistic insights into how the brain's prefrontal cortex and hippocampus coordinate to enable flexible behavioral strategies through large-scale electrophysiology and optogenetics studies in rodent models. The project will generate scientific outputs including peer-reviewed publications, computational models integrating reinforcement learning and dynamical systems approaches, and datasets characterizing neural population dynamics during strategy-switching and problem-solving tasks. These research products advance fundamental understanding of cognitive flexibility mechanisms and contribute to the NIMH mission of transforming mental health treatment through basic and clinical research discovery.