Dr. Sorinel Adrian Oprisan, assistant professor of physics at the College of Charleston (CofC), has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the most prestigious of the foundation’s awards and the first for the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CofC. The award provides $500,000 to support up to five years of computational neuroscience research and educational outreach. Oprisan’s project, titled „Prediction of Synchrony and Phase-Locked Modes in Neural Networks based on Stimulus Time Resetting Curve,” will investigate how large neural networks processes and respond to external stimuli by large-scale computer simulations. Such an interdisciplinary approach will significantly add to our knowledge about the human nervous system and its related disorders. Research in Oprisan’s lab is primarily focused on implementing new computational paradigms for biophysically realistic neurons and large-scale neural networks. Educationally, the project will support both formal instruction through interdisciplinary computational biology classes and hands-on in-depth research experience for undergraduates.

Oprisan holds a B.S. in Physics from Alexandru Ioan Cuza university, Iasi, Romania. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the same university. Oprisan holds a Masters degree in Computer Science (bioinformatics) from the University of New Orleans. Prior to joining the College of Charleston faculty, he was Postdoctoral Associate in computational neuroscience at the University of New Orleans.