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Prakash Kara received his PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. His previous faculty positions were at the Medical University of South Carolina, as Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor. He came to the University of Minnesota as a Full Professor in 2018 as the first hire in a new initiative, the Medical Discovery Team (MDT) in Optical Imaging and Brain Science.
The Kara lab solves puzzles in sensory perception and neurovascular coupling in the mammalian brain. Our long-term goal is to obtain a comprehensive view of how the brain adapts to change in adulthood, development, and disease. The short-term goals of our current projects are to (1) resolve aspects of neural coding of binocular signals in the visual cortex, (2) build microcircuits for neurovascular coupling and (3) determine the underpinnings of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).We use two-photon and three-photon imaging, optogenetics, and electrophysiological techniques. More specifically, we assay synaptic and spiking activity along with the responses of individual blood vessels to sensory stimuli and optogenetic activation.