UCLA Neuroscience Program Ph.D. Admissions Neuroscience Faculty UCLA and Beyond  



Neil Harris
Plasticity after Traumatic Brain Injury

Email Address:  ngharris@mednet.ucla.edu
Home Page: http://www.birc.ucla.edu/

Mailing Address:
10833 Le Conte Ave
Phone Numbers:
310-206-5691 Office
310-825-8646 Lab


Selected Publications:

Selected Publications. ; .
Johnstrom P, Fryer TD, Richards HK, Harris NG, Barret O, Clark JC, Pickard JD, Davenport AP. Positron emission tomography using 18F-labelled endothelin-1 reveals prevention of binding to cardiac receptors owing to tissue-specific clearance by ET B receptors in vivo.. Br J Pharmacol. 2005; 144(1): 115-22.
Chen SF, Richards HK, Smielewski P, Johnstrom P, Salvador R, Pickard JD, Harris NG. Relationship between flow-metabolism uncoupling and evolving axonal injury after experimental traumatic brain injury.. J Cereb Blood Flow Metab 2004; 24(9): 1025-36.
Lythgoe MF, Sibson NR, Harris NG. Neuroimaging of animal models of brain disease.. Br Med Bull. 2003; 65: 235-57.
Chen, S Pickard, JD Harris, NG Time course of cellular pathology after controlled cortical impact injury.. Experimental neurology. . 2003; 182(1): 87-102.
Harris, NG Gauden, V Fraser, PA Williams, SR Parker, GJ MRI measurement of blood-brain barrier permeability following spontaneous reperfusion in the starch microsphere model of ischemia.. Magnetic resonance imaging. . 2002; 20(3): 221-30.
Harris, NG Lythgoe, MF Thomas, DL Williams, SR Cerebrovascular reactivity following focal brain ischemia in the rat: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.. NeuroImage. . 2001; 13(2): 339-50.
Harris, NG Lythgoe, MF Thomas, DL Williams, SR Cerebrovascular reactivity following focal brain ischemia in the rat: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.. NeuroImage. . 2001; 13(2): 339-50.
Harris, NG Zilkha, E Houseman, J Symms, MR Obrenovitch, TP Williams, SR The relationship between the apparent diffusion coefficient measured by magnetic resonance imaging, anoxic depolarization, and glutamate efflux during experimental cerebral ischemia.. Journal of cerebral blood flow and metabolism : official journal of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism. . 2000; 20(1): 28-36.
Research Interest:

Our experimental brain trauma research takes advantage of the UCLA microPET and microCT imaging centre and this approach will soon expand to use of the Brain Injury Research Centre small animal 7 Tesla MRI which was installed in January 2007. These are important resources that confer valuable translational research capabilities both for funding activities as well as the acquisition of clinically-relevant data using highly reproducible animal models of brain trauma. The general research emphasis of our work is on recovery of function after trauma with general goals of: 1. understanding how the initial perturbations in cerebral blood flow and metabolism affect the ability of the brain's endogenous mechanisms to alter functional outcome; 2. determining how changes in the molecular environment of the extracellular space either permit or inhibit neuronal sprouting after trauma. The small animal neuroimaging and spectroscopic capabilities will allow us to monitor both the physiology and function of the injured brain and how it responds to potential treatments. Combining end-point, double-labelled deoxyglucose-autoradiographic and in situ hybridisation assays together with detailed immunohistochemistry allows us to not only obtain powerful datasets for answering these questions, but also provide great insight into the cellular basis for the neuroimaging signal. RNA and protein analysis of either growth factors or inhibitors or markers of cellular plasticity, together with behavioural measures of function are employed in parallel experiments to provide a further means to identify the mechanisms by which the injured brains responds to improve outcome.