In recognition of his research’s potential to have a lasting impact on neuroscience, Chen Ran, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Scripps Research, has been selected to the Searle Scholars Program’s 2025 class of new members.

The Searle Scholars Program provides grants to scientists pursuing high-risk, high-reward research. Winners are selected based on the programs belief that their work will advance fundamental understanding of a wide range of biological processes, and in some cases lead to novel strategies for developing the next generation of therapeutics. This year, 15 recipients were selected from a pool of nearly 200 applications.

Ran was selected for his project “The coding of internal senses in the brain,” which aims to provide a systematic understanding of how signals from the visceral organs are encoded in the brain to regulate physiology and behavior, as well as how this process goes awry in diseases. The hope is that these findings will one day lead to the development of novel therapeutics for conditions like hypertension, obesity, diabetes, eating disorders, pulmonary diseases and more.

At Scripps Research, Ran’s lab is studying how the brain uses external senses to interact with the world around us and process that information to internal organs. His lab has developed an imaging platform to enable them to track how the nervous system detects different stimuli in the body and how the brain’s neurons respond. His previous work using this platform revealed that internal organs are topographically represented in the brainstem, forming a “visceral homunculus” or map of organs in the brain.

Among his several honors, Ran has also been awarded the NIH K01 Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award, the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Transition to Independence Award and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award.

Ran’s grant totals $300,000 for a three-year term. Funding is provided by the Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust and administered by the Kinship Foundation.