Self-Organizing Units Lab
Bioengineering 3D brain tissues to model disease, behave, and experience.
Neural Disease
Consciousness
Minimal Cognition
Neural tissue engineering
For billions of years, living systems have gradually developed strategies to overcome challenges within their environments. Today, we draw inspiration from these natural innovations to develop synthetic tissues, organs, and organisms. Tissue engineers play the role of biological architects, sculpting new living structures from biomaterials and cells to model features of our bodies in a dish. At the SOUL, Dr. Rouleau and his team are using tissue engineering to build miniaturized brain models to deconstruct the mind and uncover the building blocks of minimal and embodied cognition including intelligence and consciousness.
Research Themes
The Rouleau Lab (SOUL) is an interdisciplinary neural tissue engineering and biophysics laboratory with three main focuses:
Modeling Neural Injury and Disease
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and neurodegenerative states such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) are major sources of suffering worldwide. We use bioengineered brain models to understand their mechanisms and screen therapies to enhance translational medicine. Minimal models of disease minimize complexity while preserving physiological relevance - cutting through the noise to shine a light on the proximate and ultimate causes of disease.
Building Minimally Cognitive Tissues
Cognitive systems harness computational resources to solve problems in the real world. What are the fundamental mechanisms that give rise to intelligence? What are the necessary and sufficient elements needed for sentience? Do brain tissues in petri dishes "think"? Our goal is to design platforms to assess cognition in vitro and deconstruct mind and consciousness.
Identifying Brain-EMF Interactions
Brain are electromagnetic organs made of living tissues with material-like properties. They respond to and emit electromagnetic radiation in the form of electric/magnetic fields and light. Toward the goal of situating the brain among the many types of systems that can display cognitive properties, we are investigating its interactions with EMFs and light.
What's next?
The SOUL is transforming with every new member into an incubator for ideas and a place where possibilities become reality. The brain is the most complex object known to our species - let's discover its origins and functions together.
Engineered biocomputers
Brain assembloids
Neural bases of free will
Lab Members
Our team is growing - we are currently a small group of neuroscientists and bioengineers with a passion for discovery.
The Rouleau Lab (SOUL) is part of the Center for Tissue Plasticity and Biophysics (TPAB) at Laurier, which is co-directed by Dr. Nirosha J. Murugan and Dr. Nicolas Rouleau.
Dr. Nicolas Rouleau, Ph.D - Principal Investigator
Dr. Jesse St. Jean - Post-Doctoral Fellow
Cooper Kansala - M.Sc. Candidate
Joselle Solarino - M.Sc. Candidate
TBD - Incoming MSc. Student
Jada Beuttenmiller - Undergraduate researcher