MIRA Award – Patrick Emery, PhD

The R35-MIRA award is a new NIH funding mechanism aimed at providing long-term stable funding for a whole lab, giving therefore greater freedom to investigators to explore new and exciting directions of research . The goal of our R35-MIRA award is to uncover basic molecular and neural mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms and their synchronization with the day/night cycle. Circadian rhythms play critical roles in most organisms: they optimize metabolism, physiology and behavior with the time of day. To study circadian clocks, we use Drosophila, because this model organism is particularly powerful to reveal the fundamental principles underlying circadian rhythms in animals, including in humans. Indeed, these fundamental mechanisms have proven to be remarkably well conserved. Our work might thus ultimately impact our understanding of ailments linked to circadian rhythms, and help alleviate them.