Welcome to the Kelz Lab

The Neurobiology of Unconsciousness.  

The advent of general anesthesia revolutionized modern medicine. Millions of individuals are exposed to general anesthetics each year, but the diverse molecular and neuronal mechanisms through which anesthetic drugs acts to produce their hypnotic effects remain incompletely understood.  We are driven to understand this fundamental question at the heart of neuroscience: how do general anesthetic drugs, which vary drastically on a molecular level, all lead to the same endpoint of unconsciousness/hypnosis.

In the process of working on neuronal mechanisms of anesthetic induced unconsciousness, we have uncovered the intriguing finding that the forward state transition into a state of general anesthesia is not a mirror image of the reverse state transition back to wakefulness.  Studies in the Kelz lab in fruit flies, mice, and humans are all designed to explore questions of how the brain undergoes state transition that lead to dramatic changes in behavioral arousal.  Another central question of the Kelz lab addresses the degree to which states of general anesthesia and endogenous sleep converge and how these states diverge

Max B. Kelz, MD, PhD, Vice Chair for Research, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care

Congratulations to Max B. Kelz, MD, PhD, Anesthesia Distinguished Professor, on his new role as Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. Max trained in Medicine and Neuroscience at Yale where he obtained both an MD and PhD degree.  He then trained in a transitional internship and as a resident in Anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, where he has served as a department member since 2004.  Max has a very impressive CV demonstrating excellence as a researcher including, multiple NIH grants, more than 100 peer reviewed publications and an H-index of 29.  Clearly, Max is well prepared to be our next Vice Chair for Research.

Congratulations Max!

Latest News

  • CONGRATULATIONS to Adeeti Aggarwal, PhD, on her outstanding thesis defense! Wednesday, September 15, 2021

    Her successful defense was entitled,  Visual evoked feedforward-feedback traveling waves organize neural activity across the cortex in mice. Adeeti is part of the Neuroscience Graduate Group and will now continue with her clinical rotations as part of the MD, PhD program.