Despite a heavy infusion of public and private support during the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries in Oregon reported that housing and food insecurity shot up during the onset of the pandemic in March of 2020 — and their basic needs remained in doubt through at least the end of the following year. The survey data were reported in a study led by Oregon Health & Science University and published today in the Annals of Family Medicine.

Leila Nabulsi, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in computational neuroscience at the Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) has received funding to expand research on the neurocircuitry that underlies bipolar disorder. Nabulsi was awarded the prestigious 2025 NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, a highly competitive grant that provides early-career researchers with crucial pilot funding to pursue new avenues in mental health research. The new funding will allow Nabulsi to more closely investigate changes in white matter (the tracts that connect one part of the brain to another) by comparing individuals with and without bipolar disorder. Already, she has begun mapping these pathways on a very fine scale, finding microstructural changes in the white matter that links the limbic system and the basal ganglia. That has helped confirm that the structural changes in bipolar disorder are anatomically tied to the very brain regions that regulate mood, motivation and emotional processing.