It’s a 3-year Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience grant, funded by the NIH, joint with Aryn Gittis from Biological Sciences at CMU, titled “Diverse effects of GABAergic inputs on a basal ganglia output center”. Rubin and Gittis will study control of the output signals of the basal ganglia, which is a brain area involved in action selection and reward-based learning. The project will combine recordings from neurons with data analysis and mathematical modeling to understand the origins of surprisingly diverse firing patterns of these neurons as well as changes that occur during dopamine depletion associated with conditions like Parkinson’s disease (PD). The work could have implications for the development of new therapies for PD.