Charles "Lee" Cox

Charles "Lee" Cox didn't focus on epilepsy as a research topic for personal reasons, even though that would have been understandable. There is a history of the disease in his family, but Cox's interest in epilepsy was spurred by what he thought it could tell science about how our brains work.

"What triggered it for me in my initial studies was that I was very interested in learning and memory at the cellular level," said Cox, who is best known on campus as Lee. "I was a psychology major and I was in a traditional physiological psychology graduate program. One of the big interests of ours that excited me was trying to understand at the cellular level what underlies learning and memory. Is there a "learning cell" and what are the particular mechanisms that give rise to it?"

That research path Cox began during his grad school days continues today as a member of the NeuroTech group at the Beckman Institute. An Associate Professor in the Illinois Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Department of Pharmacology in the College of Medicine, Cox studies the cellular mechanisms underlying behavior and cognitive functions. He and his group investigate topics like sensory processing and neuronal excitability with a focus on the thalamus which, from its position on top of the brainstem, relays information from different parts of the brain to and from the cerebral cortex.

"We're basically asking the most fundamental questions about how neurons talk to each other and learning their language," Cox said. "That's really the nuts and bolts of it. If you build up from there, neurons give rise to behavior and a lot of different neurological conditions as well."

That is what led him to study epilepsy.

"Epilepsy is basically neurons that have gone a little crazy, hyperexcitability," Cox said. "We're studying the basic language of the brain, how neurons communicate and we're really interested in the long term communication of neurons. If you look at what we know about mechanisms of learning and memory at the cellular level it's basically a heightened amount of excitation that is long-lasting.

"If you go increase the excitability further, you can get to a state where there is hyperexcitability that can lead to runaway excitation resulting in epileptic discharge. So many mechanisms that scientists think are involved in epilepsy are the same mechanisms that are likely involved in cellular learning."

Lee was on an epilepsy training grant as a postdoctoral researcher but, again, his interest had to do with what the disease revealed about the mechanics of neuronal communication.

"My father has epilepsy," Cox said. "This has always been the interesting thing: I never really thought about studying epilepsy but I have kind of done it in a roundabout way. In the beginning I was just excited to study synaptic physiology."

Cox's specific interest in the area of synaptic physiology has to do with the role of longer-lasting signals between neurons and their action in brain function. He focuses on thalamocortical circuitry because of the important role that the thalamus plays in relaying information.

"You can almost think of the thalamus as a structure that is basically like, let's say, the core of a head of lettuce," he said. "And it connects to the whole outside sheet of a head of lettuce. So it's in a unique position to tie things together."

Cox said the thalamus ties things together by integrating and synchronizing the shorter and longer-lasting neuronal signals that power brain function.

"In regards to sensory processing, the thalamus is a region where a lot of information integration occurs before reaching the neocortex," Cox said. "There is increasing evidence suggesting the thalamus may play an important role in synchronizing cortical regions. You also can think of it as the freeway of sensory perception. Sensory information has to go through this before it goes out to the rest of the neocortex, or the outer covering of the brain."