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After a storied career running a multimillion-dollar business, Ted Stanley and his wife, Vada, set up a philanthropic foundation in the 1980s to invest in good causes. Their goals became a lot more focused when their son developed bipolar disorder and needed treatment. The Stanleys considered themselves fortunate that the drug lithium successfully treated his symptoms – and they want to make sure that someday, there is a much wider range of options for others with psychiatric illness.

One summer day, two ӳý researchers who had never met before sat next to each other at a lunch table. Moran Yassour, a graduate student in computational biology, and Manfred Grabherr, an engineer turned computational biologist, struck up a conversation about their research interests.

“I realized, this is the Manfred people have been telling me about,” Moran recalls. “People had told us about each other but we’d never spoken before.”

Ribosomes bind mRNA

Individual nerve cells are obscured in the dense, forest-like geography of the brain. Unlike blood cells, for example, which are solitary travelers and can thus be easily captured and studied in isolation, the nerve cells (or neurons) of the brain conceal their identities among a thicket of similar-looking, but functionally diverse neighbors. Developed by new ӳý core member Myriam Heiman during her postdoctoral studies at The Rockefeller University, a methodology called TRAP is designed to catch single types of neurons and reveal what makes them different from their neighbors.