Anthony N. van den Pol, Ph.D.

Anthony N. van den Pol, Ph.D., professor of neurosurgery, was awarded a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study a neurotransmitter whose loss in the brain is believed to be responsible for narcolepsy, an often-misunderstood disease marked by an uncontrollable desire to sleep. The grant will enable van den Pol and colleagues in his lab, including Xiao-Bing Gao, Ph.D., and Ying Li, Ph.D., cellular electrophysiologists, and Prabhat K. Ghosh, Ph.D., associate research scientist, to focus on the electrical behavior of the nerve cells in the hypothalamus that make hypocretin.