Amani Hariri

Ongoing research aimed at developing new therapies for a variety of brain disorders including Parkinson’s disease, Epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease, depend on our ability to monitor neurochemicals such as neurotransmitters in the brain. Neuroscientists have clearly established that a variety of chemical species/processes act together over multiple temporal and spatial domains to govern a specific behaviour. However, so far, no technology allows the detailed mapping of the spatially and temporally dynamic chemical content of the brain with a sufficient resolution across different regions.

Addressing these challenges will be at the heart of my group’s research goals. The research goal of my lab will be to create materials and tools that will allow a quantitative chemical view of the brain across scales from single neuron to brain slice to the living brain. Importantly, we will be focusing on:

1. Building an integrated optical biosensor that can detect “in real-time” physiological concentrations of neurochemicals in-vivo in order to achieve higher temporal resolution measurements for investigation of biological processes and behavioral events. This will enable the mapping of multiple neurochemicals at finer scales and with better precision;
2. Creating minimally invasive approaches to reduce artifacts or perturbations of biological systems caused by the measurement device;
3. Developing material chemistry approaches to address biofouling and biocompatibility problems.
4. Finally, we will expand the use of this optical biosensor platform to detect pathogens, proteins, and many biomarkers to provide valuable information about a given disease state such as diabetes and cancer.