Faculty Research Labs
In Dell Medical School’s research environment — which spans the campuses of Dell Med, the Dell Pediatric Research Institute, The University of Texas at Austin and other locations in the city — faculty using similar techniques and equipment work near each other and share expertise from diverse fields.
This fosters transdisciplinary discourse and operational efficiencies that bolster the school’s research output. Researchers and lab members benefit from opportunities to gather with colleagues in related areas of expertise to connect on their work. The result of this model? A strong team, focused on transforming health.
Lab Listing
Explore a listing of research lab websites managed by Dell Med-affiliated investigators. Faculty lab sites provide details on active work, opportunities to collaborate, openings and people working within them.
Not all research faculty members have lab sites or are represented on this page. To learn more about research taking place at Dell Med, view the latest news and discoveries, or explore individual departments, centers and institutes.
By Department, Center & Institute
- Virsotko Lab: The Virostko Lab performs quantitative MRI to improve understanding and management of diabetes and cancer.
- Physiological Laboratories: The Physiological Laboratories work across areas in electroceuticals, human physiology and digital health platforms to predict adverse disease trajectories and test the impact of interventions on health outcomes.
- Brumback Lab: The Brumback Lab aims to understand the neurophysiological mechanisms of autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.
- Clinical Neuroprosthetics and Brain Interaction Lab: The Clinical Neuroprosthetics and Brain Interaction Lab focuses on the direct use of human brain signals to control devices, interact with the environment and eventually recover from insults to and deficits of the central nervous system.
- COPE Lab: The COPE Lab’s mission is to recognize and support the role of dementia family caregivers as vital members of the health care team.
- Dobbs Lab: The Dobbs Lab focuses on elucidating the role of opioid peptides and receptors in basal ganglia circuit function and in the co-abuse of opiates and cocaine.
- Gaudet Lab: The Gaudet Lab uses a multifaceted approach to reveal beneficial strategies for improving spinal cord injury repair, neuroinflammation and neuropathology.
- Gonzalez-Lima Lab: The Gonzalez-Lima Lab’s mission is to prevent neurocognitive and emotional disorders, understand the underlying brain mechanisms and advance innovative noninvasive treatments.
- Hamilton Lab: The Hamilton Lab aims to determine how natural sounds including speech are represented by the human brain during speech perception and production, and how these representations change during development.
- Howard Neuro Lab: The Howard Neuro Lab studies the neurophysiology of epilepsy and neurodevelopmental disorders.
- Marinelli Lab: The Marinelli Lab focuses on understanding the biological bases of motivated behavior, with a focus on drug addiction.
- Memory and Aging Lab: The Memory and Aging Lab studies how individual differences in sleep quality, mood and other determinants of health contribute to individual differences in episodic memory and underlying neural mechanisms in racially and ethnically representative, adult lifespan populations.
- Melamed Lab: The Melamed Lab’s goal is to identify new sex-specific immune biomarkers of autoimmune nervous system conditions that can translate into more sensitive and specific diagnostic tests and therapeutics for people living with neurological autoimmune diseases.
- Messing Lab: The Messing Lab is interested in finding strategies and drug targets to better treat substance use disorders and to find nonopioid alternatives to treat chronic pain.
- MS.io Lab: The MS.io Lab researches multiple sclerosis, imaging and outcomes.
- Neural Circuits and Behavioral Development Lab: The Neural Circuits and Behavioral Development Lab’s goal is to understand how neural circuits are altered in psychiatric disease so that we can find new and more effective therapeutic strategies.
- Noble-Haeusslein Lab: The Noble-Haeusslein Lab is focused on translational research in the field of neurotrauma. Its overarching long-term objective is to develop targeted therapeutics that will improve recovery after traumatic spinal cord and pediatric brain injuries.
- Orsini Lab: The Orsini Lab focuses on uncovering how neural mechanisms that normally govern adaptive decision-making become compromised in pathological conditions, including substance use and post-traumatic stress disorders.
- Speech Disorders and Technology Lab: The Speech Disorders and Technology Lab focuses on basic science studies on healthy and disordered speech motor control as well as developing assistive speech technologies, including silent speech interface and speech brain-computer interface.
- Swallow Modulation Lab: The Swallow Modulation Lab uses motor learning principles and sensitive tools to study swallowing physiology in health and neurodegeneration in order to identify opportunities for novel dysphagia rehabilitation models.
- TechANS Lab: The TechANS Lab exists to help understand, develop and promote technologies that help understand and improve the lives of those with cognitive dysfunction.
- Kumar Lab: The Kumar Lab investigates the complex interactions between tumor cells and the brain’s immune environment to unravel the mechanisms driving tumor growth and progression.
- EdEN Lab: The EdEN Lab helps teachers promote learning and healthier living through hands-on school garden experiences.
- Gray Lab: The Gray Lab pursues research on fundamental questions of vertebrate musculoskeletal developmental and homeostasis.
- TherapeUTex: TherapeUTex’s goal is to aid and guide the development of drug products and technologies through this development process by providing services including drug formulation and delivery, in vitro and in vivo preclinical and proof-of-concept studies, lab-scale formulation, stability studies and production.
- Burgermaster Lab: The Burgermaster Lab uses data and technology to help people prevent and manage diet-related chronic disease with a special focus on groups for whom new technologies are not typically designed.
- Harpak Lab: The Harpak Lab studies evolutionary, statistical and population genomics.
- Dunsmoor Lab: The Dunsmoor Lab, focuses on emotion and cognition interactions governing how one learns about and remembers important events.
- Fenno Lab: The Fenno Lab works at the intersection of neuroscience, bioengineering and psychiatry to design novel molecular reagents for precise neurocircuit modulation and uncovers psychiatric disease-relevant circuit-level activity patterns and properties with translational potential.
- Fonzo Lab: The Fonzo Lab takes a multimodal, interdisciplinary neuroscience approach to studying psychiatric conditions arising from trauma and stress.
- Interpersonal Impact of Trauma Lab: The Interpersonal Impact of Trauma Lab conducts applied health services and treatment development work to directly improve psychosocial outcomes in vulnerable populations who have experienced trauma.
- Laboratory of Affective Neurogenetics: The Laboratory of Affective Neurogenetics investigates genetic influence on the structure and function of brain regions critical for perception, cognition and higher-order adaptive processing of emotion-laden experiences.
- Lifespan Development Lab: The Lifespan Development Lab addresses the questions of how and why different people progress along different life trajectories.
- Mood Addiction Interaction Neuroscience (MAIN) Lab: The MAIN Lab uses structural and functional brain imaging and behavioral techniques to examine the developmental mechanisms underlying the emergence of mood and substance use disorders during the transition from adolescence to early adulthood.
- Mood Disorders Lab: The Mood Disorders Lab’s research is devoted to improving understanding of depression so that more effective treatments can be developed.
- Morikawa Lab: The Morikawa Lab investigates neural plasticity in the mesostriatal dopaminergic system underlying reward-based learning and the development of addiction.
- Neural Circuits and Behavioral Development Lab: The Neural Circuits and Behavioral Development Lab investigates how stress throughout the lifespan affects neural circuit function and leads to behaviors associated with psychiatric disease.
- NeuroTap Lab: The NeuroTap Lab aims to understand the neurocircuitry that confers risk for psychopathology following traumatic event exposure through functional brain imaging and behavioral measures.
- Pediatric Coping and Language Lab: The Pediatric Coping and Language Lab studies family, linguistic and sociocultural influences on children’s adaptation to stress.
- Self-Regulation Lab: The Self-Regulation Lab focuses on self and authenticity, emotion, motivation, social cognition, person perception, impression formation, briding the gap between neural activation and everyday behavior and personality, and how these processes contribute to appropriate social functioning.
- Comprehensive Musculoskeletal Care Lab: The Comprehensive Musculoskeletal Care Lab studies the measurement of the subjective aspects of musculoskeletal illness and care (comfort, capability, mindsets, stressful circumstances, health agency and care experience from both the patient and the clinician experience), and its application in the care of individual patients.