The Brain Institute director leads a Tulane-wide community of scientists across three pillars: research, education and community outreach.
To count all the synapses in a single human brain, you would have to count past 100 trillion — more than the stars in our galaxy. The brain’s complexity is staggering, which is why Matthew Dalva, the director of the Tulane Brain Institute, believes no single discipline can crack it alone. He has spent his career studying the brain’s smallest pieces, and now leads a Tulane-wide community of scientists working to understand it from every angle.
“To have a fundamental understanding of how the brain works, we need to bring together people who are working dedicatedly on different projects to make progress,” said Dalva, the Phyllis M. Taylor Presidential Chair in Brain Science.
Last year, Dalva and his team made a discovery so important it landed in the journal Science: they found a brain pathway that blocks pain while still allowing sensation and the feeling of touch. The finding could one day inform new ways to treat chronic pain and other diseases of the brain.
A professor of cell and molecular biology, Dalva studies how the brain grows and forms connections. Specifically, he studies spine synapses, which make up the majority of synapses in the cortex.
“We know these are really important in disease,” Dalva said. “With autism spectrum disorder, you have too many spines. In diseases like Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia, you have too few, and you lose them over time. So understanding how spines are made is going to be important for understanding disease.”
Dalva arrived at Tulane in 2023 to direct the Brain Institute, which is undergoing explosive growth. Just during his tenure, the institute has added around ten new faculty members, bringing the membership to about 70.
The institute is built on what Dalva calls a tripod: research, education and community outreach. “Each one brings strength.”
The educational pillar trains undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students. “Those people are really the future of science,” Dalva said. “Our mission should be training them and helping expand science in that way.”
The outreach pillar takes the Brain Institute’s work into the New Orleans community, an effort Dalva sees as both a university-wide mission and one of the institute’s distinctive strengths.
Research across the institute spans from the most basic aspects of how the brain grows and develops to the impact of head injury among NFL players. This breadth points to another facet that makes the Brain Institute distinctive: its reach across the university, with faculty membership from the School of Science and Engineering, the School of Medicine, the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center and the School of Liberal Arts. This breadth is not common for centers at Tulane or at other universities, he said.
That collaboration is purposeful. The institute offers grants to support work between faculty in different disciplines, has held gatherings that bring scientists from different fields together, and trains PhD students whose research moves them across member labs.
The collaborative model has direct scientific consequences. “The Brain Institute is a community of scientists, and they’re thinking about different problems, and they have different expertise, so that drives progress in different directions. There aren’t that many places where you can bring together these different communities and have them talk to each other. That’s the mission of the Brain Institute.”
The brain’s complexity also keeps pushing scientists toward new tools. Dalva sees artificial intelligence as a critical frontier. “The brain has about 6,000 different cell types — about the same as the rest of the body combined. To understand the brain, we need to know how those cell types interact, how they work together. Large learning models are going to be enormously helpful.”
His vision for the institute is steady growth in the right places: several new faculty members, an expanded graduate program and continued investment in interdisciplinary collaboration.
The brain may be a complex universe of 100 trillion connections, and Dalva believes the Tulane Brain Institute is the perfect place to map it.
