The creation of C-PIES is a new milestone in the College’s long standing inclusive efforts, as well as a key pillar of its 10-year strategic plan.
With a mission “to recruit, support and retain a diverse population for all sectors of our community ― staff, faculty, and students ― and build an inclusive community that broadens access to science and mathematics and creates opportunities for advancement,” C-PIES will continue to expand programming across the College of Sciences community.
Prior to the creation of C-PIES, Keith Oden, who retired in December 2020 following a 35-year career with Georgia Tech, served as director of Academic Diversity for the College for ten years. With a focus on student recruitment and retention, Oden’s expertise, outreach, and mentoring transformed the lives of students and the College of Sciences community.
“From reflections and conversations with College of Sciences colleagues, I became convinced that a center focused around broadening access and creating a diverse community would be more effective than tasking a single individual with all programmatic elements needed to advance our mission,” said College of Sciences Dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair Susan Lozier in a community letter this summer.
Now, working in tandem with Dean Lozier, ADVANCE Professor Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, and the College’s associate and assistant deans, as inaugural C-PIES Director, Wheaton will lead the Center in implementing recommendations from the College’s Task Force on Racial Equity, coalescing collaborative work across the College’s six schools, and leading new and ongoing efforts.
“I am excited about this new direction and its potential for making significant progress toward our goal of creating a diverse and inclusive community,” Lozier noted in sharing Wheaton’s appointment with the College of Sciences community earlier this August.
Along with leading C-PIES, Wheaton will continue his focus on research and community leadership beyond Georgia Tech. Since joining Georgia Tech in 2008, Wheaton has directed the Cognitive Motor Control Lab, where he strives to improve the lives of people with upper-limb amputations and those who have had strokes through a deeper understanding of the neurophysiology of motor learning.
Outside the lab, Wheaton has worked across communities on campus – serving on the College of Sciences Task Force on Racial Equity and Georgia Tech’s working group on Race and Racism in Contemporary Biomedicine, and being named the 2021 Faculty Diversity Champion for Georgia Tech – as well as throughout Georgia.
Along with serving as a member of the Smyrna City Council since first elected in 2019, Wheaton also helped shape rehabilitation policy and management in the state of Georgia as a Governor-appointed member of the State Rehabilitation Council during a six-year term.
We recently spoke with Wheaton about C-PIES, serving on NIH’s National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research, and progress and service across Georgia Tech, and beyond.
Q: What was your initial reaction to the creation of the C-PIES, when it was announced in April?
A: Probably a mix of excitement, enthusiasm, and a little bit of trepidation to be honest. I think when you start talking about equity and inclusion, those are loaded concepts and very loaded terms, and people define them very differently. So, the trepidation side was more ‘Okay, how is the community going to receive something like this center as a whole?’
At the same time, I reflected on a lot of the conversations that I had with people one-on-one, and also as a result of being a part of the [College of Sciences Task Force on Racial Equity], and there’s a lot of encouragement there. This is the kind of thing that I think, by and large, people in the College want to see and are excited about. It’s a new type of opportunity for the College and it’s something that people want to rally around. So, it was a constellation of all of that all at once.
Q: What interested you about the opportunity to direct the Center?
A: Similarly, my initial feelings, honestly, including the trepidation.
I love science. I’m really, really passionate about what I do, and I’m passionate to the point of wanting to make sure that everyone gets the opportunity to at least be exposed to the possibility of doing science – and specifically doing it here at Georgia Tech. That means a lot to me. Given where [Georgia Tech is] seated within this community, within this region, within this area, we have a unique opportunity here. We should be an attractive force for doing not only science that focuses on or considers equity and inclusion, but that is being done by a population of scientists that is reflective of the broader community around us.
Those opportunities really jumped out to me as something that would be exciting to me – exciting to lead, exciting to figure out how to collaborate with other groups to [accomplish these goals]. Pulling from some other experiences that I’ve had at other places, I just thought, “you know, this could be fun.” And I think we are at a good time to do something like this.
Q: You’ve been involved in a lot of community efforts – a race and racism in biomedicine working group, middle school outreach with Georgia Tech CEISMC (Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing), Science Day in the Park with GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute), and more. What is your approach to promoting this work, as well as a sense of community?
A: I think it starts with having honest conversation. By that, I mean really getting past statistics, talking points, and all these other things. Really get to understanding what the challenges are and what the perceptions are.
Also, because I tend to like to know how we’re going to move forward, it’s being very focused on very actionable goals. Being very clear about “Okay, these are the things that we can do now, these are the things that we can maybe target down the line, and these are the things that will be in our 10-year plan.”
We have very concrete, actionable steps that we can take to move things forward. But at the same time, also always communicating with people about what we’re doing, maybe even sometimes what we’re not doing. That clarity and that focus are, I think, what you have to have when you’re dealing with this type of issue, unfortunately because it is sensitive sometimes. But I think that’s what’s needed here.
Q: What are some of the main challenges you see this center as a whole facing?
A: You know, I think perception is everything. I’m going to be honest, [this topic] can be very uncomfortable for some people, and something that some people just disagree with – or that they think they disagree with, I should probably say.
Perception suggests that this center might focus on one thing, but in reality, the perspective is usually much broader. I think a lot of people will immediately think “Oh, this is just about bringing in more women or more people of color into different units.” It could include that. But it could also be, “What scientific questions are we asking? How are we responding to equity needs of our immediate community? To the state? To the nation? Are we asking sharp enough scientific questions that are immediate to some of the needs that are clearly emerging from funding agencies and other organizations that focus on inequity?” That is a part of this, too.
Q: As the inaugural leader of the Center, what immediate goals do you envision for yourself? Your long-term goals for C-PIES?
A: To start with the latter, I hope that the Center, as it evolves, turns into a real catalyst for change. Change not just in building a better community, diversifying our community, and promoting better inclusion, but also creating a catalyst for new questions, new horizons that we should be pursuing that are really addressing the needs of the community. I would love to see the Center evolve in that direction.
To get there though, the first things I’m excited about doing initially are having conversations. Let’s, as campus leaders, get people together and really, just conversate about these issues. Let’s see what our various levels of comfort and sensitivity are around these things. Do we even understand some of these words and phrases and what they mean? Because they’re complicated and they come with a lot of emotion.
Also, starting to identify opportunities for growth within various units within the College that are ripe for development in this area, and going after resources nationally or at the state level to try to move the needle forward in terms of the type of people we have in our labs, the type of people we have teaching, the types of folks that we have sitting in faculty units across campus. Let’s really think innovatively about how we can be a leader in this area.
What’s exciting and inspiring to me is that we see a lot of other universities around the country, and even some of our competitors, that are boldly pursuing sustainable efforts. That tells me it can be done — we just have to do it. That’s all it is, it’s very simple. It sounds complicated and messy, but in reality, it’s incredibly simple. You just have to want to do it.
Q: What are you most looking forward to as you start this new position?
A: I’m just excited to get started. I’m excited to do the work and see the change.
I am convinced that once we, as a community, acknowledge that this is not as hard and messy and complicated as it sounds – once we’re over that barrier, then we can really have progress. But we still have to make sure that we are all united, and clear on that barrier. And that’s what I’m excited about.
Q: As a member of NIH’s National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research board, you will be advising the directors of NIH, National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Can you elaborate on what that will entail?
A: A lot of this really focuses on trying to get feedback from the scientific community about the types of discoveries that we need to be making to really move the rehabilitation needle forward. Rehabilitation, in the broadest terms, includes disorders, nervous system injuries, all kinds of things that need rehabilitation.
That’s a broad aspect of NIH’s portfolio. This board will be critical to ensuring that NIH-funded medical rehabilitation research continues to be at the tip of the spear of innovation. I am excited to be on the Advisory Board to make sure that we are thinking proactively about the way that science is emerging, even how our trainees are emerging, to make sure that the funding priorities are aligned with the questions that we need to ask on the ground.
Q: What was your reaction to NIH asking you to serve on this board?
A: I was kind of surprised, actually. I think this is a really exciting opportunity, and it felt good for NIH to reach out and ask me to do something like this. To me it was absolutely a no-brainer to accept it.
Q: What are your main goals as an advisor?
A: I’m certainly in a space where I care a lot about rehabilitation, particularly with limb loss and stroke. But I’m also very interested in understanding how we can better intersect computational and engineering aspects into sciences to ask better questions — and how we can use all these things together to understand how to move rehabilitation forward. I’m excited to share my perspective from this space, and to really get at the root of some of these questions.
Another big area is “telerehab” – it’s taking off as an industry and taking off as a science, as well. That’s great, but we still have bedrock scientific questions that we need to understand about the efficacy of telerehab approaches. So those are the types of things I’m excited to think about on this advisory panel, and to try to hopefully have some influence on how we’re shaping these types of things and the funding priorities that need to emerge from NIH.
Q: In addition to these new positions, you are also a member of Smyrna City Council — and you teach, advise students, and run a research lab. How do you balance all of that?
A: I have a wonderful wife – we are very supportive of each other when it comes to this kind of stuff.
Also, it’s really seeing the common threads of thought between everything. Being on City Council, in many ways, is not unlike being in academia. There are a lot of meetings, that’s very similar. But the thought process, the way you’re doing things, the way you’re going about trying to solve problems is very scientific. So, it feels kind of natural. When I go into all of the spaces that I’m in, I try to at least have that as a common thread, where I’m approaching things in the most genuine way that I can. I’m a scientist, so that’s how I’m going to approach things.
At a practical level, it’s finding balance between these things so that I can honestly give them my full commitment and know that in that moment, that’s what I’m focusing on. If I’m talking to one of my students, in that moment they have all of my attention. If I’m talking to a constituent in my ward, they have my full attention. I want to be actionable and responsive to all the needs of that person. It’s not easy — I’m not going to say it’s trivial, but it’s a balance that you just learn how to strike.
As well, I’ll say, in all aspects of these areas, there are great people. The staff that I get to work within each one of these spaces is exceptional. I’d be lying if I said I was doing it all myself – there are a lot of people that help pull me through all these areas. They really deserve a lot of credit.
]]>Editor and Media Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
The team’s findings, published in the journal Nature Sept. 20, offer the first window into the intricate workings and mechanistic effects of DBS on the brain during treatment for severe depression.
DBS involves implanting thin electrodes in a specific brain area to deliver small electrical pulses, similar to a pacemaker. Although DBS has been approved and used for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease for many years, it remains experimental for depression.
This study is a crucial step toward using objective data collected directly from the brain via the DBS device to inform clinicians about the patient’s response to treatment. This information can help guide adjustments to DBS therapy, tailoring it to each patient’s unique response and optimizing their treatment outcomes.
Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.
]]>Ayana Isles
Media Relations
404.660.2927
“We’re starting to see more proposed projects from teams who have not traditionally worked in Parkinson’s disease,” said Garrett Stanley, professor and founding director of the McCamish program in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.
“This is one of the goals of the McCamish Program, to help scientists and engineers who have worked in other areas bring their ideas and talent to understanding, treating, and one day curing Parkinson’s disease,” Stanley added.
The five new multidisciplinary Blue Sky research teams bring a broad range of expertise for projects focused on robotics, wearables, assistive communication technology, and advanced personalized therapeutics. Grants were awarded in two categories: $40,000 for two teams engaged in earlier-stage research and $125,000 for three teams.
A team led by Coulter BME Associate Professor Charlie Kemp is using a $125,000 award to combine the concepts of fun and utility. They’re developing a therapeutic robotic game system to increase and enhance the patient exercise experience, while reducing the demands on therapists. The goal is a future where people with Parkinson’s disease can play therapeutic games at home with interactive robots, giving therapists more time to provide individualized guidance.
Robotics researcher Yue Chen has a completely different aim in mind. He’s leading a team of engineers, scientists, and clinicians in developing, “a safer and more accurate approach for deep brain stimulation electrode placement during Parkinson’s disease treatment,” he said. Chen is an assistant professor in the Coulter Department, and his team received one of the larger grants.
“The Blue Sky grant will allow us to develop collaborations with the surgeons, identify the critical gap, and collect the preliminary data for future external grant applications,” Chen said.
Emory’s Amanda Gillespie, director of Speech Pathology of the Emory Voice Center, is leading a team using its $125,000 grant to design the Speech-Assisting Multi-Microphone System (SAMMS), wearable technology that can isolate, monitor, and analyze vocal loudness and provide biofeedback to the wearer when minimum loudness targets aren’t met.
This is a continuation of a Blue Sky project that began with the first round of seed grants, last year. “We aim to make further improvements to the technology based on our pilot study feedback and evaluate the device over a prolonged period of use with patients, testing the hypothesis that using the device improves vocal loudness in conversation over time,” Gillespie said.
Minoru Shinohara, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, is leading a $40,000 early effort in wearable tech. Shinohara’s project aims to treat motor symptoms — like tremors, rigidity, and poor balance — with an on-skin, wireless system that automatically assesses dance therapy motions, with the aim of improving lower-limb motor control.
“Long term, we’d like to apply this approach to various rehabilitation exercises and clinical populations,” Shinohara said.
And Michael Borich, who runs the Neural Plasticity Research Lab at Emory, is leading a team leveraging its $40,000 award to begin preliminary work on improving mobility and reducing falls in Parkinson’s patients.
“The long-term goal of our project is to develop personalized, non-invasive brain stimulation techniques targeting abnormal cognitive-motor interactions,” Borich said.
The Blue Sky seed grant program, made possible by a gift from the McCamish Foundation, launched last year to identify and support engineers and scientists at Georgia Tech and Emory who can bring innovative approaches to Parkinson’s research.
“We are building a community of researchers across Georgia Tech and Emory that expands on what was already a strong effort in the Atlanta area,” Stanley said. “In future years, our goal will be to work towards narrowing the scope to focus on a coordinated effort across multiple teams, which is really unique and exciting.”
]]>Jeffrey Markowitz and Anqi Wu have joined a cohort of 125 early career scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. The Sloan Fellowship awards are the most competitive, prestigious awards available to early career researchers. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, fellowships award rising scientists $75,000 on any expenses supporting their research over a two-year term.
Markowitz’s research focuses on how the brain decides which action to perform at each moment in time – that is, action selection. He is interested in the cortical and subcortical circuits that mediate this process and how they go awry in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
“This is a great honor, and I’m very fortunate because this award gives us a fair amount of freedom in the early stages of our research,” said Markowitz, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Sometimes, how creative you can be is defined by how flexible your support is. This award is really key as we try new, innovative things in our work.”
Wu’s research aims at leading next-generation computational neuroscience. Her research develops integrated data analysis tools to provide systematic, comprehensive understandings of neural mechanisms and biological functions, pushing the boundary of computational models for neuroscience.
“The fellowship provides significant financial support for my early-stage research career,” said Wu, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. “I will use it for the research on developing advanced statistical models for neural and behavioral data analyses. My hope is to help experimental neuroscientists to decipher the massive datasets they collect and provide interpretable insights into our brain.”
Full story on Jeffrey Markowitz
]]>Neuroscience is the fastest growing undergraduate major in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech, and prospective and current students often enjoy hearing from our alumni about their experiences in the program.
We recently spoke with the NEURO ‘22 Kashlan brothers about their time at Georgia Tech, advice for students, and a look at what’s next on the horizon:
Zane: The Neuroscience program at Georgia Tech is unique in that it's incredibly interdisciplinary. As Neuroscience majors, students can freely take courses in Georgia Tech's top-ranked programs like engineering, computer science, and even business on top of a regular course load filled with biology and other science core curricula.
In addition, the broad nature of the curriculum offers students an opportunity to explore all areas of Neuroscience, including Biological Neuroscience, Neuroengineering, Computational Neuroscience, and several other pathways that help develop essential lifelong skills. It is a fantastic STEM major to pick as students who want to explore different career paths and pick up different skills. We enjoyed charting our individual experiences within Neuroscience and are so grateful for the advisors and professors who supported us along the way.
Zane: Georgia Tech has always felt like a second home to us. We were born and grew up in the Atlanta area. Georgia Tech offered a strong list of notable faculty members. The modern campus is big enough to explore different interests in a wide variety of subjects. Tech offered a special place for us to be challenged, make new friends, and grow independently as a trio.
Rommi: I would add the fact that Georgia Tech offered an unparalleled value of education.
Rommi: There were so many professors and mentors that helped shape me into the person that I am today. For example, my involvement with Dr. Ragan in the BRAIN Initiative helping promote neuroscience to students in schools around the Atlanta area, enforced my love for neuroscience and giving back to the community. Dr. Decker, who mentored me as a TA, instilled and enforced my passion for teaching. Dr. Shepler, who I worked closely with in mentoring students in Chemistry under the PLUS Program, further deepened my love for teaching science. Dr. Harrison, who guided me through my first teaching experience in the biology department, is another example. Like all other professors, they were vital in facilitating an engaging, fun, and highly memorable learning environment.
Zane: From the very long list of professors I had an extraordinary time learning from, I especially enjoyed being a TA for Dr. Decker in Anatomy and Pathology. Dr. Tyson helped develop my interest in mentoring others and deepening my experience in Organic Chemistry. Dr. Senf provided continuous support in sponsoring the Students Against Alzheimer's organization I helped found and fostered my passion for scientific communication and advocacy. Also, a thank you to the GT 1000 program for allowing me to be a part of mentoring the next generation of Yellow Jackets – Sandi Bramblett and Dr. Rafael Bras for showing me the ropes of leading by example and to Savitra Y Dow and Dr. Lacy Hodges for their constant support.
Adam: I'm so grateful for all the professors I had the privilege of learning from and taking classes with over my tenure at Georgia Tech, such as Dr. Decker, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Holder, Dr. Weigel, Dr. Whyte, Dr. Howitz, Dr. Kerr, Dr. Harrison, and Dr. Duarte. I especially value my experience with Dr. Shepler, with whom I took chemistry in my first year because she made the learning of science meaningful and fun. Dr. Senf helped develop my scientific writing skill, which is critical in neuroscience research. Dr. Ragan, with whom I took NEUR 4001, for learning so much about research methods, proper presentation creation and delivery, paper writing, and making the atmosphere of every class fun and engaging.
Rommi: Sometimes it worked out that we would have similar classes since we're all neuroscience majors. Still, most semesters, we would only share a required class or two, while some classes might be with different professors because of time conflicts with other courses. We each prioritized taking whatever classes worked best with our individual schedules and graduation plans, but taking a lesson or two [together] was always fun.
Rommi: The most remarkable thing I've learned about the human brain is how much we don't know about it. Out of every meticulous detail we know about human physiology and function we have barely scratched the surface of our cognition and thinking. This leaves so much room for exploration in neuroscience research because there is so much yet to be uncovered.
Adam: After my first year, my earliest class usually started around 10 a.m. On a typical day, I liked to wake up at around 9 a.m. if I didn't have any events or important assignments to complete. After taking some of my morning classes, I would almost always go to the fourth floor of the Crosland Tower [in the Price Gilbert Memorial] Library to do my assignments and study before lunch or my following classes. After grabbing some lunch and attending the rest of my classes that day, I usually went to the CRC to play basketball with my friends or eat dinner. On busy days though, I went back to studying or completing projects and other longer assignments in preparation for exams or important deadlines.
Adam: I would probably have to say graduation. While it is a bit cliché, knowing that your years of hard work through trials and tribulations have finally amounted to something great is amazing.
Adam: I enjoyed Six Flags Night with my friends in the fall; Lake Lanier to enjoy the water; and the [Atlanta] Beltline, which has an amazing history. I had the opportunity to visit [there] with my English class during my first year.
Rommi: I'll add the Georgia Aquarium to that list — the whale sharks and penguins make it an awesome experience.
Zane: During my first semester, I enjoyed my experience in GT1000 and looked up to my team leader for the class. I joined the GT1000 program because of that experience and served as a team leader for my first two years on campus and then as an ambassador for my last year. I enjoyed helping students work through many of the challenges I had once experienced as a first-year. Since my first year, I have spent a good portion of time outside class as a volunteer and advocate for the Alzheimer's Association, where we urge our national leaders to support increased care and research funding to one day end Alzheimer's.
By connecting with other volunteers in the state and country, I saw the need for younger voices to get involved in the cause. I founded Students Against Alzheimer's, a student-led organization that works with the Alzheimer's Association to get younger advocates involved. I'm also grateful to have had the opportunity to go to Washington D.C. with other advocates, where we met Senator Raphael Warnock and other states/national representatives to push for updates in legislation. I would spend a lot of time with family or having fun in the Atlanta area in my free time.
Adam: I joined and participated in the Georgia Tech Swim Club, founded a GT chapter of the American Parkinson's Disease Association, and was part of Student Government during my first year. Outside of school, I was heavily involved with my research at the Woolf Lab for the past two years. I volunteered as a medical assistant at the Good Samaritan Health Clinic. I was also a part of several organizations where I tutored and supported Georgia's refugee children, which I have been involved in since middle school.
Rommi: The organization I was involved in the most was Teaching and Academic Services at Tech. I participated as a PLUS leader and one-on-one tutor, assisting in events such as Studypalooza. The opportunity to give back to my peers through teaching and guidance was a great experience. Outside the classroom, I helped lead the BRAIN initiative, whereas as a neuroscience student, I went to schools around the Atlanta area to hold activity-filled seminars promoting the learning of neuroscience.
The students observed activities such as a human brain dissection, controlling nerves in your arm, and a "mind control" machine. These activities deepened my love and advocacy for neuroscience. I also discovered my passion for helping others, volunteering as a trained nurse assistant at the Good Sam Health Clinic. I also had the privilege to be part of the task force set up to design the process of Covid-19 testing for the students and the community at GT in preparation for reopening the campus.
Zane: Aside from balancing time and managing classes, the most important and unexpected lesson I have learned is knowing when to ask for help. It was important along our journeys to connect with fellow students and professors to get extra support during the more challenging weeks or when making career plans. I feel that Tech's most valuable resource doesn't come from the new buildings or courses, it's the role models – our peers and mentors – that we engage with daily.
Rommi: GT enforced several lessons — including problem-solving, how to persevere, self-motivation, and putting things into perspective.
Adam: I would definitely have to say that Principles of Neuroscience (NEUR 2001) was the hardest class that I have taken at Georgia Tech. It's a four-credit class I took my first semester and included a lab component. You essentially learn most of the basic neuroscience curriculum in one extremely demanding class. The lab consists of lots of reports that have to be extremely in-depth and are significantly longer than normal papers. The lecture had a significant portion of the grade dedicated to exams which were incredibly detailed and required memorization of the minor details. It was a challenging experience, but looking back I'm grateful because it allowed me to adjust to Georgia Tech's rigorous curriculum early and understand foundational neuroscience, which helped my research.
Zane: I think the most important part of being interested in STEM is just that — curiosity. Being curious about everyday scientific phenomena is the crux of being a good researcher or engineer. Just by staying curious so many doors are open for learning. A student can start with some YouTube videos, hone that passion by taking a course or joining a lab, and who knows, maybe one day that passion will turn into a career.
Zane: Building a career in medicine takes a long time, maybe up to 12 years or more after college. Get involved through internships and research as early as your first year and take the time to figure out what about medicine and health interests you. There are so many opportunities, not only within the scope of being a clinician, but also in medical research; medical technology; medical business; and medical law. Going down the path of a physician is certainly not the only way to have a career in health.
Make sure that you network with your peers and alumni to find out what others have career ideas that can serve as inspiration for yourself. I especially recommend taking a gap year or two before making such an impactful commitment to exploring all potential career opportunities that might interest you before dedicating yourself to a life in medicine.
Adam: I agree with Zane that you must do a lot of soul-searching when you commit to the field of medicine. This is a highly specialized career you will spend the rest of your life doing. Remember that you need to love what you do; otherwise, you will not be happy, and your patients will pick up on that.
Rommi: I'm an early morning person, so most of my studying took place before I began my first class, which was typically in the late morning or afternoon. The rule of thumb is to study for two to three hours for every lecture hour, so I always tried to study the material ahead of the lectures to get familiar with the topics being presented in class as they are taught and then revisit the material immediately after.
Adam: Spaced repetition, consistency, and time management is the key to excelling in school. I can confidently say that you don't need to be the smartest person to get the best grades because you can outweigh that by being more disciplined and efficient. Finding a study habit that works for you is the key. Oftentimes, what works for one person most likely won't work for another. You must learn and discover what works best for you through iteration in your first semester.
Discover the studying habit that helps you perform best on exams and assignments. What worked for me was spacing out my studying ahead of exams and using spaced repetition, so I would revisit concepts multiple times before taking an exam rather than moving through the material progressively and not reviewing old lectures.
In addition, I would ramp up my studying a few days before an exam with the most time spent the day before and the day-of, because I found it easier to recall small details from a PowerPoint slide when reviewing it an hour prior to taking the exam (after multiple run-throughs, though).
The strategy can sometimes vary between classes: brute repetition and memorization works in a subject like biology — but not so much in a conceptual subject like physics and math that requires more practice than learning.
The second half of doing well in classes is understanding the syllabus and finding what assignments or exams you need to score well on. Maximizing your grade in non-exam/quiz assignments gives you the highest chance of getting an A in the class and oftentimes gives you a buffer to score an 80 or 85 exam average.
Adam: My favorite study spots on campus would have to either be the fourth and fifth floor of the Crosland Tower Library or the third floor of the CULC. The Library's first floor is always packed, so the quiet upper floors were great for studying. The bridge connecting the two main libraries was also a relaxing spot to study since the windows give a nice view of the city and keep the area well-lit.
Rommi: I'm a big sandwich guy; throughout my time at Georgia Tech, I've probably had upwards of a thousand sandwiches between classes. You can always count on the 14th Street Jimmy John’s.
Rommi: I crashed a lot on the beanbags on the fourth floor of CULC building, hung around the dorms a lot, tried to forget about it, and worked towards the next assignment or class to study for.
Adam: When struggling in a class, I always reminded myself that I wasn't alone. I stressed that I should continue to persevere and not get demoralized if I got a bad exam grade, or didn't understand some concept right away. I noticed that classes at Georgia Tech usually got harder as the semester progressed, until the eighth or ninth week, then eased off significantly as the final exam approached.
My biggest piece of advice for all students would be to focus on scoring as high as possible on all non-exam grades, like participation and homework assignments that you have the most control over. Getting close to a 100 percent in those sections carries your average significantly and allows you to have the room to tank a few bad quiz or exam grades, and gives you lots of buffer for the final exam.
It's also important to keep track of your grade in the class and what grade section you're underperforming in (homework, quiz, test, etc.). This lets you know what assignments mean the most to your grade and prioritize time between different classes and assignments to maximize your chances of keeping your averages high.
Rommi: I think not falling too far behind made it much easier to prepare and be ready. Don't wait; go seek help if you don't understand a topic fully. GT has a lot of resources for help when needed. Take advantage of all that is available. A key piece of advice, read your syllabus at the beginning of the semester and fully understand the professor's expectations. Study ahead and follow the syllabus.
Adam: Balancing school, sleep, and a social life can be challenging. I always liked to keep a few consistent hobbies fit into my schedule, like playing basketball at the CRC or even just walking around campus at night so I could have some escape from the pressure of school.
I learned that getting into a routine and set schedule also helps with this balance because you get more hours out of your day when your time is managed properly. Unfortunately though, there will be times when you will have to sacrifice going out on a Friday night to complete a project or make sure that you perform well on an exam.
I encourage you not to feel bad about making these hard decisions because it all becomes worth it come graduation day. That said, having some avenue to de-stress from school and have fun is super important, even if it's a small activity for a few minutes a day because studying at Tech without taking a break will burn you out quickly.
Also, sleep is your friend — don't ignore it. It's a cheat code to improve your mood and mental health, reflect on your school performance and social relationships, improve your mood, etcetera.
What are your plans for the rest of 2022 and beyond?
Adam: After graduating in the spring, I moved to Boston to work as a research assistant in the Woolf Lab at Harvard Medical School. We study non-opioid-based analgesic drugs used in the treatment of chronic pain. I will apply to medical schools next summer and want to pursue a career as a physician focusing on improving immigrant and refugee health in the United States- my passion since middle school.
Zane: In late April, I switched my research work from Yale Medical to the Woolf Lab at Harvard Medical. In the future, I plan to combine my passion for research and medicine as a physician-scientist to improve patients' lives suffering from neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's.
Rommi: I moved to Boston with Zane and Adam and have been focusing on volunteering at various clinics and studying for my MCAT exam. After taking the MCAT exam this fall, I will start working as a research assistant.
Zane: The decision has to be between making great friends and calling such an amazing school home.
Rommi: The best part of being a Yellow Jacket is knowing that I am ready to face any new challenge, confident that I will do well.
Adam: Developing many relationships and connections with friends, mentors, and professors at the school have continued to benefit me even after graduation. Also, coming from Georgia Tech opens up many doors and opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't get at other schools — the name and prestige of the school mean a lot to employers and graduate schools.
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Special thanks to Dean Kashlan for organizing this interview, and to Georgia Tech Office of Undergraduate Education and our College of Sciences student writers for sharing questions for this story.
]]>With a passion for inspiring others and making neuroscience more accessible, Ragan, a faculty member and lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences and the director of Outreach for the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience at Tech, is a leader in developing neuroscience-related outreach events.
For the past two years, Ragan has been annually awarded a $1,500 seed grant from the Dana Foundation to design that kind of outreach in celebration of Brain Awareness Week, the Foundation’s global campaign dedicated to fostering curiosity and enthusiasm for brain science.
Arriving at Georgia Tech in early 2021, Ragan organized a virtual Brain Awareness Day event for middle school students that welcomed over 100 attendees.
Everyone is Welcome: Science & Engineering Day at GT 2022
This spring’s programming, scheduled on campus for March 19 as part of Science & Engineering Day at GT, is set have an even bigger audience. (Organizers have confirmed that anyone who missed the RSVP period for this day-long celebration is still welcome to attend without registration, with limited courtesy parking available in the central lot shown here.)
As the 2020 Carol Ann Paul Neuroscience Educator of the Year, Ragan’s dedication in the space has already made an impact on campus. This month, we spoke with Ragan to learn more about Brain Awareness Day and her approach to reaching community members beyond campus:
Q: What is Brain Awareness Week, and why do you think it’s important?
A: Brain Awareness Week, organized by the Dana Foundation, is a great way to share Neuroscience to the public in a way that is engaging, fun, and accessible to a broad audience. We are celebrating Brain Awareness Week in three ways: 1. Our Brain Awareness Day event as part of the Atlanta Science Festival (March 19 from 10am-2pm in CULC 483 and 487), 2. Laboratory Tours for High Schoolers during the March 19 event, and 3. Visiting the Drew School on April 1. My organizing committee of Neuro undergraduates (Rommi Kashlan, Brenna Cheney, Claire Deng, and Payton McClarity-Jones) have been extremely helpful in planning these activities.
I love that we get to involve our undergraduates for our outreach events, so they get to teach others all about the brain. I think it's important for the public to learn about the nervous system since it plays such a critical role in pretty much everything we do. Even when we are asleep or daydreaming, our brain is hard at work.
Science doesn't need to be restricted to folks who have formal degrees. Every time a kid asks, "but why?" they are acting just like a scientist!
Q: Seed grants are often given to help researchers or faculty begin to develop new projects or programs. What project or program do you hope to develop with this grant?
A: I would love to get involved with folks involved in STEM education in the greater Atlanta area to assess the outcomes of events like these. Who are we reaching and who do we still need to increase our efforts to? How can we reach the most people? What kinds of events not only promote students to pursue STEM careers, but also encourage appreciation and literacy for science for those who aren't in STEM fields? I'd also like to form strong relationships with area schools so we can share our Neuroscience demonstrations with them, as well.
This is the second year I have received this grant and I am so excited that we can use it to increase the number of resources we can use for Neuroscience outreach. It is a tremendous honor to be recognized for something I consider so rewarding.
I would love it if attendees for our Atlanta Science Festival event walk away excited, inspired, and curious about Neuroscience. I hope that this year's attendees become regular attendees annually and spread the word to their friends. I would love for attendees to tell their parents and teachers about it so we can arrange more school visits, especially to schools who may not always get opportunities
Q: Where does your passion for neuroscience outreach stem from?
A: My mom introduced me to community outreach at a young age through various volunteering opportunities. She instilled an appreciation, rather than an obligation, for serving others and I have her to thank for promoting that. I always had fun volunteering, especially as a family, and never found it to be a chore.
It wasn’t until graduate school when I became involved in Graduate Women in Science that I started doing STEM outreach. During my Postdoctoral Fellowship at Michigan State University, I was involved with the Neuroscience Fair and school visits for Brain Awareness Week. At Purdue University Northwest, I organized my very own Neuroscience Fair event that hosted 500 attendees.
Q: What’s your favorite neuroscience outreach event or program that you’ve done?
A: I call Brain Awareness Day (the event that will be part of Atlanta Science Festival this year) my “Super Bowl”. I love seeing all the attendees engaged with the presenters and the look on their faces when they learn the neuroscience behind the activity. It's really funny when their minds are just blown away after the gears start turning and they figure something out.
Q: Why do you think this kind of outreach is important?
A: Neuroscience outreach is important, especially for middle school girls, because that is the time in their lives when they are unfortunately taught that being smart or liking science isn't for girls. I don't expect everyone who attends our outreach events to become scientists, but I do aim to encourage an appreciation for science and to think like scientists.
We are truly in the Information Age, and it is our job as educators to help students learn how to evaluate all this information that is literally at their fingertips.
Q: How do you envision outreach playing into the future of Georgia Tech’s Neuroscience program as it continues to develop?
A: I think outreach can have a positive impact for our Tech students and for the community. I envision outreach being something that our program is known for to provide our students an opportunity to engage with the public in a way that is fun and an application of what they have learned in their classes.
I think that what we offer students in the classroom is just a small portion of their education. I would love to foster relationships with other schools and youth organizations to make neuroscience accessible to all.
]]>Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences
jess@cos.gatech.edu
More information about the Brain Awareness Day event:
Science & Engineering Day at GT
A recent paper by an interdisciplinary team of authors from the School of Psychology and the School of Economics at Georgia Tech discovered that through psychology and neuroscience, good navigators often use a bird’s eye view perspective to organize and remember different places in the environment and have a map-like representation of the environment in their mind. Bad navigators on the other hand, often use a route-based, or turn-by-turn, strategy to learn the environment, making their representation of the environment much less configural.
“A comparison of reinforcement learning models of human spatial navigation,” recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, explores reinforcement learning (RL), a popular type of machine learning algorithm which the famous AlphaGo is built on, to further investigate these individual differences in spatial navigation.
Academic Professional and first author Qiliang He explained, “What RL can offer — whereas other traditional measurements can’t — is that RL can quantify how much a navigator relies on their ‘map-like’ representation and how much they rely on their ‘turn-by-turn’ knowledge to go from Point A to Point B. It’s a number between 0 to 1, with 0 indicating complete reliance on turn-by-turn knowledge and 1 indicating complete reliance on map-like knowledge.” He added that the study combines psychology and computer science/data science.
“The critical thing which RL brings to the table for human navigation research is it helps us interpret how ‘adaptive’ a person’s strategy is,” noted Assistant Professor of Psychology Thackery Brown. “For example, sometimes navigating a well-learned route is just as efficient as any other path we might come up with to reach a goal — in this case, the person navigating that route isn’t necessarily a bad navigator, but may actually be allocating their brain’s resources in the most efficient way.”
Brown added that in the study, RL was used to characterize how someone’s current navigational choices relate to 1, the quickest option to reach a goal and 2, how this option seems to build on their past experiences. “We can get a much richer understanding of why a navigator chooses the path that they do and how efficient it is in terms of their current understanding of the environment.”
The paper is unique in that it combines an interdisciplinary group of authors, and that co-authors include two undergraduate students. In addition to Brown and He, co-authors of the paper included undergraduates Lou Eschapasse, who is studying Neuroscience in the College of Sciences with a concentration in Biomedical Engineering in College of Engineering; and Neuroscience major Elizabeth H. Beveridge. The team also included then-graduate student Jancy Ling Liu, formerly mentored by Brown, who is now with the Georgia Tech School of Economics Ph.D. program.
“[The] two undergraduate students contributed significantly to the research, earning authorship in the paper,” said Tansu Celikel, professor and chair of the School of Psychology. “This is a great example of the research ecosystem available to undergraduates at Tech.”
“In our lab, we place great responsibility on the Georgia Tech undergrads who work with us, and they flourish under this real sense of ownership of the studies which we conduct,” said Brown. “In my time as a professor we have had many majors from across the breadth of programs at GT — and Elizabeth and Lou are perfect examples of how brilliant, motivated, and well-trained our students are in neuroscience, psychology, and the related disciplines.”
“The undergraduate research assistants provided very helpful suggestions during the conceptualization stage of the project,” said He. “[They] collected most of the data, and participated in the writing and revision of this paper.”
Elizabeth Beveridge, one of the undergraduate research assistants, has published three papers with Brown and He, won the PURA (President's Undergraduate Research Award) twice, and has her thesis under invited revision in a prestigious psychology journal. Beveridge's fellow undergraduate research assistant, Lou Eschapasse, has published two papers, and has finished a follow-up study on neuroimaging.
“I think these are both great examples of the research ecosystem available to undergraduates at GT, even during the time when we couldn’t meet face to face,” said He.
“I always knew I wanted to get involved in research, so I reached out to Professor Brown during my fall semester of freshman year. As a neuroscience major, I have always been interested in memory and how we use those past experiences to make decisions,” Beveridge shared. “I feel so lucky to be named as a co-author, and I am extremely appreciative of Professor Brown and Qiliang He. They have been amazing mentors and taught me so much about research throughout college.”
The team's study was conducted between February 2020 and September 2020, at the time COVID was first reported in the United States. “We discussed this project via an online meeting platform during the pandemic and we deployed this project into apps that could work on participants’ Windows and Mac computers,” He said.
Besides using an objective way to quantify navigation strategy, He explained that they were also interested in how consistently people were using their ‘default’ strategy. “We hypothesize that good navigators not only use map-like strategy more often, but also adaptively change their strategy according to the environmental characteristics. We reason that the changing navigation strategy can be good but also cognitive demanding (i.e., using more cognitive resources, or to think harder).”
He explained that they predict that in a stable, predictable environment, good navigators tend to stick to one strategy to preserve cognitive resources. In an unpredictable environment, good navigators tend to vary their navigation strategy more often to meet the navigational needs at the expense of cognitive resources. “The consistency of using a specific navigation strategy can also be estimated by the RL model,” He added.
“Navigating is computationally very challenging for the brain (the stimuli, goals, and relevance of our prior knowledge to the choices we need to make are constantly shifting),” noted Brown. “And it might be tempting to assume certain navigational strategies are inherently better than others. But following a well-worn route can free up resources for us to hold conversations, plan our next tasks, or monitor for dangers in our environment.”
The findings are important, because they show most peoples’ navigation reflects a hybrid of different ways we learn from our past successes and failures (different RL models), and a person’s unique mixture of more turn-by-turn and map-like learning helps define individual differences in how well they do under different types of navigational demands, Brown added.
“The insights from the study could inform interventions to teach people to be better at navigating challenging situations and can even inform efforts in computer science and robotics to develop artificial agents which can learn to solve navigational problems in the ways people do.”
Citation: He, Q., Liu, J.L., Eschapasse, L. et al. A comparison of reinforcement learning models of human spatial navigation. Sci Rep 12, 13923 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-18245-1
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
]]>Editor and Contact:
Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
Mitchell developed a neurological condition at 18 that has resulted in quadriplegia, and she rarely has encountered other professionals in STEM fields with similar disabilities. That’s made it imperative to her to be the role model she didn’t have.
“As a disabled professor, I want students from diverse backgrounds and disabilities to feel empowered and included,” Mitchell said, “and to know they have professors who can relate to them.”
The assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University has made a point to involve students from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of abilities in her lab — from high school interns to Ph.D. students.
She’ll get to build on those efforts as one of the first awardees under an initiative from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to recognize and support excellent early career biomedical researchers who have a record of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Science Diversity Leadership award program includes $1.15 million in grant funding over five years. The organizations announced the initial round of recipients Oct. 19.
“To increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the biomedical sciences, we must do everything possible to attract, retain, and nurture top talent at our colleges and universities,” National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt said earlier this year when the initiative was launched. “We are pleased to partner with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative on this effort, which will recognize and encourage faculty who make mentorship and stewardship a top priority in their academic programs.”
Mitchell will use the funding to support her lab’s efforts to develop large-scale biomedical data integration and machine learning methods to identify features that explain health disparities or improve disparities in health outcomes.
“The Science Diversity Leaders program will enable us to focus on data integration and machine learning technology specifically aimed at predictive medicine for rare diseases and diseases where there are known health outcome disparities. Such rare diseases and underrepresented populations are often under-funded through traditional programs in academia or industry,” Mitchell said. “The program also will expand my ability to mentor even more underrepresented students in our large predictive medicine research internship program.”
Mitchell’s lab is indeed large: She estimated she has mentored and advised more than 160 students in the last five years, including a significant number of minority students and students with disabilities.
In addition to undergraduate researchers, she has an active internship program for high schoolers from historically underrepresented backgrounds that will get a boost from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant. And all of those students get the benefit of Mitchell’s guidance as well as the Ph.D. students she advises, she said.
“You may have heard the saying, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ I believe scientific mentoring is the same,” Mitchell said. “I strongly believe in individual mentoring meetings between the principal investigator and the student. However, I also believe it is crucial that students have peer mentors within the lab, research teams within the lab with structured student leadership, as well as external professional development through scientific meetings and specialized programs.
“Students and early stage investigators need an entire network of supportive mentors who have a diverse set of experiences, viewpoints, and ideas.”
Along with their leadership on efforts to diversify the pipeline of future scientists, award winners have made significant research contributions to the biomedical sciences and show promise for continuing scientific achievement.
]]>Jeffrey Markowitz thought he was scheduled for an ordinary Zoom meeting with Machelle Pardue, associate chair for faculty development in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Running a little late, he hopped on the call and there was the smiling face of Coulter BME Chair Alyssa Panitch on the screen along with Pardue.
Then, suddenly a mystery guest appeared on the call a representative from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation broke into the meeting, delivering the good news that Markowitz had won a 2022 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering – and to capture his reaction for their Twitter feed.
“I immediately covered my face and was like, ‘what?’ This was a such great surprise,” Markowitz said. “When you apply for something like this, you try to put it out of your head, because you never expect to get it.”
The Packard Fellowships are among the most prestigious grants for young faculty members, awarded to some of the most innovative early career scientists in the nation. Markowitz gets $875,000 funding over five years — and the freedom to take risks and explore new frontiers in his research.
“It means that we can back away a little from the grind of grant applications and just focus on doing cool science,” Markowitz said. And he has some big ideas in mind.
“The question we’re interested in is, how does your brain control everything you do? Every second — really, much faster than that — your brain is making decisions about what to do with your body,” he said. “We know this process isn’t easy, because when it fails the consequences are severe — as in Parkinson’s or Huntington’s diseases. We’re really excited to have the opportunity to study this process, and to use the understanding we gain to push the envelope in treating neurodegenerative disease.”
"Every second — really, much faster than that — your brain is making decisions about what to do with your body. We know this process isn’t easy, because when it fails the consequences are severe — as in Parkinson’s or Huntington’s diseases. We’re really excited to have the opportunity to study this process, and to use the understanding we gain to push the envelope in treating neurodegenerative disease."
– Jeffrey Markowitz
Markowitz wants to study this elemental process, and he's using the mouse model. But his interest in the brain began on what he called “the abstract side. In graduate school, I was basically doing applied mathematics — building models of the brain mathematically, on a computer.”
After Markowitz's computational work with researcher Stephen Grossberg, he was drawn into the lab of Tim Gardner at Boston University (now at University of Oregon). Gardner got Markowitz interested in experimental work with the zebra finch, a songbird.
“We asked a biological question: How does a songbird sing? So we built electrode arrays specifically to record neurons in the zebra finch,” Markowitz said. “The arrays had to be really stable, because birds fly. This gave me the bug for balancing aspects of engineering methods with biology, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”
As a postdoctoral researcher, he switched from birds to mice, answering biological questions using machine learning. The work helped Markowitz “see the power of not just building the device to collect the data, but also building the algorithm to make sense of the data. Those three things — biology, machine learning, and device engineering — when you mash them together it sounds a lot like neuroengineering.”
When Markowitz was applying for faculty positions, he found a strong presence of all three things at Coulter BME and Georgia Tech where, he said, he could work next door to an expert in optics and another expert in gene sequencing, with a culture of youthful energy in the broad computational neuroscience space that he works in.
Today, his primary research approach is to use 3D motion capture of a mouse as it freely explores a large arena. This requires using a variety of techniques to simultaneously record what the neurons are doing while the animal is moving, with the ability to then dial in specific changes to their brain activity.
“For example, let’s say we’re recording, and we see that cells one, two, and three seem really engaged when the mouse is rearing up and sniffing the wind,” Markowitz said. “If we want to know which one is actually important, we go in and ping those cells in very specific patterns while the animal is doing what it does naturally.”
Basically, Markowitz is trying to read and then write neural activity in freely moving animals. As a postdoc, he helped develop a software tool called MoSeq (for motion sequencing), designed to quantify 3D video of freely behaving mice and uncover the organization of mouse behavior.
“MoSeq is like gene sequencing, but for behavior,” Markowitz said. “It takes in all of this data and basically allows us to relate neural activity to free behavior. Now what I want to be able to do is build new systems that let us figure out how the brain controls everything an animal does behaviorally, in real time. The exciting part is, that the technologies we build to understand motion will also help us improve motion in patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases.”
]]>So many things occur in those few seconds — perception, actions based on countless subconscious experiences, sensations — and all are orchestrated through the coordinated activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons.
Dyer, a computational neuroscientist, wants to understand that symphony of neural activity. And the National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping her with a Faculty Early Career Development Award – or CAREER award. The NSF’s most prestigious award for young researchers, the five-year grant helps establish a foundation for a lifetime of integrated work in research and education.
“This is a great surprise and really exciting for my lab. On a personal level, the CAREER is a great reflection on the work we’ve been doing monitoring large populations of neurons in different regions of the brain,” said Dyer, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
As principal investigator of the Neural Data Science Lab (or NerDS Lab), Dyer’s work has blurred the line between machine learning and neuroscience. Her lab has been at the forefront of advances in neural recording and gathering data. She wants to use the CAREER award to address the next challenge.
“With all these massive datasets we now have, it’s time for us to mine it — to make sense of it all,” Dyer said.
Her CAREER project, funded with $500,000 over the next five years, will focus will be on developing new machine learning methods to map what is happening between the neural activity that we never see and the complex behaviors that we seem to perform with ease. Like drinking a cup of coffee.
“We can use these new approaches to better understand neural computation, or compare neural activity between individuals,” Dyer said. “Then we can create dynamic models that accurately capture the changing nature of the brain over time as a result of aging or disease.”
Dyer’s CAREER Award is the latest in a flurry of impressive honors and awards that have come her way in recent years.
She was one of three researchers in the U.S. to receive a McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award in 2020. Then her lab won its first National Institutes of Health R01 grant, in the form of a BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Award.
Also, as part of a growing community of researchers at Georgia Tech working in computational neuroscience, Dyer is a sought-after collaborator. She recently became co-principal investigator of another NSF-supported project kicking off in October that includes principal investigator Vidya Muthakumar, assistant professor in Tech’s Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Industrial and Systems Engineering, and other researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Maryland.
Like much of Dyer's work, including the CAREER project (which also kicks off in October), the work will involve the development of ew machine learning tools, innovations, she said, "that lie at the heart of a lot of our recent innovations in decoding brain states."
]]>An innovative exploration of technological interventions into the human brain.
In what Georgia Tech Arts and Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre (TMBT) have dubbed the “Neuroethics Grand Challenge,” the two companies along with acclaimed choreographer Troy Schumacher and internationally revered new media artist Sergio Mora-Diaz explore neuroscience and the ethics of intervention with AI and other technologies.
Our brain is the path to human experience. Interacting with the adaptive brain has the potential to challenge our self-understanding, arguably more than any other scientific discipline. John Welker, TMBT’s artistic director, says “In any collaboration, there are surprises that are part of my joy for discovery, but this particular process has made me so much more aware and appreciative of the intimate connection between our minds' intention and how that is carried out through the movement of our bodies.”
The artists’ collaborative partnership extends to a team of researchers led by Christopher Rozell, professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Karen Rommelfanger, president and founder of the Institute of Neuroethics Think and Do Tank. Other faculty who engaged with the artists by discussing their research include: Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor, Annabelle Singer, assistant professor, Garrett Stanley, professor, and Lena Ting, professor, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; and Doby Rahnev, associate professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech.
Rozell, who has been with the project since its inception, states:
“Science and technology research is pushing us to the boundaries of what we know about the human brain, and that forces us to wrestle with ideas that are insufficiently described by our current language. The arts can help us process this emerging understanding in new ways that go beyond language and can do it by creating something beautiful that we can celebrate as a uniquely human experience. I couldn’t be prouder of the way that this project has fulfilled the potential of integrating science and the arts.”
Creativity plays an important role at Georgia Tech
The premiere of Step the Brain Along a Path comes as the final phase of a three-year project that included two work-in-progress showings in 2021 presented by Georgia Tech Arts. Adding to the opportunities for outreach and engagement will be a video installation in the Ferst Center lobby displayed in tandem with the performances of the ballet, offering insight into neuroscience at Georgia Tech. For this installation Georgia Tech Arts connected Atlanta-based creative artist Kimberly Binns with a Georgia Tech team led by Rozell with graduate student lead Abby Paulson, BMED, Kyle Johnsen, BMED, and GT alumnus Timothy Min, M.S. Music Technology 2022.
“We had no idea what would happen when we brought together these scientists and artists,” says Aaron Shackelford, the director of Georgia Tech Arts. “What we did know was innovation happens in these creative spaces where arts intersect with research. Throughout this three-year journey we have had the opportunity to see artists, faculty, and graduate students learn from each other and inspire each other, and been able to invite our campus and community to join in this process. The arts provide these unique experiences, these encounters that nurture new ideas and new ways to understand cutting edge research and the human condition. This is why the arts play such a critical role at Georgia Tech, and why this project embodies the possibilities for arts and research across our campus.”
Step the Brain Along a Path was commissioned in part with support from the Charles Loridans Foundation.
Design image (c) Sergio Mora Diaz
Dancer photo Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre (c) Felipe Barral
]]>“There is a very high morbidity and mortality rate for these babies,” said researcher Vahid Serpooshan, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, whose lab develops tissue engineering technologies to study and better understand pediatric cancers.
Despite advances in treatment, neuroblastoma still accounts for about 15% of all pediatric oncology deaths. And more than half of those patients who do respond eventually relapse.
“Even with advanced treatments that have been successful, like chemo-immunotherapies, some of these babies will respond, and some won’t respond at all,” Serpooshan said. “We don’t really know exactly what is going on, and that is a huge dilemma. Part of the problem is, pediatric cancer in general has not been intensively studied as a specific and distinct disease. The challenge is, we need to develop better research tools.”
With that in mind, Serpooshan’s lab has collaborated with Emory pediatric oncologist Kelly Goldsmith to create a new 3D printed, dynamic model of pediatric neuroblastoma tumors that could lead to improved, personalized treatments for young patients.
Serpooshan and his team are focused on the neuroblastoma tumor microenvironment and its influence on tumor behavior and the tumor's response to therapy. These interactions play significant roles in cancer progression, metastasis, and response to therapies.
“In recent years, this has become an area of great research interest, but there is a lack of reliable and biomimetic experimental models,” said Serpooshan, whose team’s recent study in the journal Advanced Science details their work in developing an in vitro model of neuroblastoma using a relatively new technology called 3D bioprinting.
Instead of utilizing metals and plastics to create a device or model, as in traditional 3D printing, the bioprinting technique uses materials like cells and hydrogels to create functional 3D tissues. These materials, called bioink, mimic the composition of human tissues.
Serpooshan’s lab has been a pioneer in using bioprinting in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications, which is the group’s primary focus. For this project, the researchers applied a hydrogel called gelMA as the bioink.
Then human-derived neuroblastoma spheroids (3D cell cultures that mimic tissues and microtumors) and human vascular endothelial cells (the cells lining blood vessels) were incorporated into the bioprinted gelMA to create a working model of the neuroblastoma tumor microenvironment.
The researchers manufactured their model and studied the processes of cancer under static and dynamic conditions — static, when nothing is really moving through the system, is the approach most often used in drug screening with in vitro applications, “which is a big limitation,” Serpooshan said.
To track the tumor under more realistic, or dynamic, conditions, researchers used a bioreactor to simulate blood flow through the vasculature. Their analysis of the tumor environment under these conditions offered the most effective representation of what goes on between tumor cells and the vasculature, demonstrating in three dimensions how aggressively a tumor can grow, and how it may or may not respond to drugs.
“This is just a first step, but we’re very excited for having developed such a robust platform that can be adapted for a lot of future research applications,” Serpooshan said.
They’re starting with neuroblastoma, because Goldsmith’s lab has access to neuroblastoma cells from a variety of different patients and sources that now can be studied in a new way.
“Some of these patients already have shown resistance to chemo-immunotherapy,” Serpooshan said. “So we can take advantage of this clinical data and create different models, drill down to the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms at play, and potentially come up with scenarios and strategies to help those patients who are resisting the drugs. Now we can move forward and ask more meaningful and clinically relevant questions.”
Video of 3D Bioprinting in action
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However, there’s a downside – off-target side effects, neurotoxicity being among the more prevalent and significant. Pain, fatigue, weakness, strange sensations, and difficulty with balance are the common symptoms known collectively as chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, or CIN. For many clinicians, this has been a fair trade-off – powerful, toxic cancer drugs save lives, but kill neurons. It’s the price of survival.
Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher Stephen Housley isn’t buying it.
“The basic position has been, ‘we cured your cancer, but you have neurotoxin damage, so let’s manage those symptoms.’ Because when neurons becomes dysfunctional, it is challenging to correct it,” said Housley, a neuroscientist, physiologist, and licensed physical therapist who works with Tim Cope, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and with cancer researcher John McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.
But what if the nerve cells didn’t have to become dysfunctional? What if you could stop the damage before it even begins? Housley and his colleagues aim to find out with help from a new NIH National Cancer Institute R01 grant, “which will help us really drill down into some of the mechanisms of neurotoxicity experienced by cancer survivors globally,” said Housley, who is leading the research effort.
Cope, principal investigator on the $2.5 million grant, added, “building on our recent discoveries, we’re taking a new direction that has the promising potential to identify novel targets for treating neurotoxic damage to the neurons that are responsible for movement disorders.”
The grant will support a growing area of research for Cope’s team, which published a paper on its discoveries earlier this year. Housley was the lead author of “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment”, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Cope and Housley work in the pre-clinical phase of cancer treatment, developing and studying animal models to mimic the human condition, so they can study the effects of chemotherapy on the individual neurons and circuits that human behaviors and perceptions emerge from. Previous studies from other labs have determined that these drugs are causing the nerve damage by themselves, but the Georgia Tech team discovered a more nuanced set of circumstances.
“Biology is more complex than that – the cancer interacts with the chemotherapy, changing the underlying causes and worsening the nerve dysfunction long-term,” Housley asserted, explaining that the majority of previous studies have focused only on the effects due to chemotherapy.
“If you are diagnosed with cancer and are treated with these drugs, in the great scenario, you go into remission and stop the drugs," he added. "The problem is, the side effects don’t stop. They actually evolve and convert into something a bit different than what was happening early on. And they persist for a long time, in many cases over a decade.”
Housley and Cope have focused on the chronic phase of cancer and discovered that there is a likely a link between what happens in the earliest stages of treatment and the long-term probability of developing neurologic disorders.
“While a patient is in the chair getting chemotherapy, they will not only have sensory problems, but an increased stimulation, often perceived as being painful or hypersensitivity to cold,” Housley said. “And you will see people with muscle spasms, and twitching, really visceral responses. The speed at which these drugs can impact the nervous system is stark. The motor system that helps us move is being affected in the course of minutes or hours.”
This muscle hyperactivity is due to an increase in the excitability of the nervous system across both the sensory and motor systems, and that spiking behavior – the currency of the nervous system– can last for days after the treatment. And then, the nervous system goes haywire.
In response to the infusion of these PBC drugs, the system overcompensates. The hyper excitability goes in an opposite direction. So now, instead of an electrical jolt, the system slows down: when reaching for and grabbing a cup of coffee, the collaboration between your motor and sensory systems gets fuzzy. Is your sensory system correctly anticipating the weight of the cup while your motor system grabs and lifts? Will the cup slip and spill hot coffee on your lap?
Housley, Cope and their multidisciplinary team, including McDonald, want to stop the initial hyper excitability from happening in the first place. Through a process called in vivo electrophysiology, they use glass electrodes to study the behavior of single cells as they respond to stimulation, such as that caused by the reaction of cancer to a platinum-based drug. With these approaches they are testing new pharmacologic and gene therapy approaches to prevent hyper excitability.
“It’s a challenging but powerful approach,” said Housley. The ultimate goal is to block the neurotoxic effects of the drugs, so that they can beat the cancer and not harm the patient’s long term health and quality of life. “Through these experiments, we want to knock out the various drivers of what we suspect is causing this serious problem, and ultimately prevent the long-term consequences of these neurological disorders.”
]]>Georgia Tech’s MURIs are both primarily within the School of Physics. First, Simon Sponberg, a Dunn Family Associate Professor of Physics and Biological Sciences, leads a team discovering how animals strategically use sensing and cognition to make decisions in complex environments. The project, Fast, Lexicographic Agile Perception Integrates Decision and Control in a Spike-Resolved, Sensorimotor Program (FLAP), specifically addresses the core DoD topic area of understanding neural systems integration for competent autonomy in decision and control.
“We have all these great, sophisticated algorithms for processing big data, but an animal doesn't have time to process a million samples of its environment and then figure out what’s a predator,” said Sponberg.
Studying moths for their agile, sophisticated flying and complex sensing abilities, the team will record electrical activity in the brain to determine how the moths make decisions and use natural language processing techniques to see how a moth derives meaning from sensory cues and movements. The goal is to develop an information processing framework that enables quick, flexible decision-making that could facilitate the next generation of autonomous bio-inspired systems and better integrate living systems with engineered technologies
The interdisciplinary nature of the team makes complex research possible. Half the team is made of experimentalists: Sponberg specializes in sensors connected to motor systems with precisely timed signals; Jeff Riffell, a professor at the University of Washington, studies how the nervous system processes sensory signals to control behavior; and as a vision neuroscientist at Florida International University, Jamie Theobald, determines how animals parse complex environments. The other half of the team will build the framework: Duke Professor Vahid Tarokh models complex datasets, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Hannah Choi focuses on neural networks, and Cornell Professor Silvia Ferrari ties it all together as a control theorist embedding control in neural structures.
“MURIs were originally training grants for the DoD to develop the next generation of scientists who would make progress,” said Sponberg. “This funding will allow us to have postdocs and graduate students across all six labs and disciplines working together tightly and creating a community.”
For the second MURI, Programming Multistable Origami and Kirigami Structures via Topological Design, Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Zeb Rocklin is part of a team exploring a new class of origami- and kirigami-inspired flexible, lightweight structures capable of transitioning between many stable shapes to perform different tasks or adapt to changing environmental conditions. These structures could be used in a range of applications, from multifunctional robots and collapsible antennae to rapidly assembled bridges and temporary structures, and force protection elements like origami-inspired bulletproof shields.
The team combines experts in mathematics, physics, material science, mechanics, robotics, numerical modeling, and computation, including Harvard University Professors Katie Betoldi, Jennifer Lewis, L. Mahadevan, and Robert Wood, as well as University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Eleni Katifori
The researchers will develop mathematical models to characterize and design the complex mechanical behavior of multi-stable origami and kirigami structures; new scale-spanning manufacturing processes that efficiently integrate actuation and sensing; and experimental test beds to serve as a platform for evaluation and optimization of design concepts.
"This project benefits from Georgia Tech's ability to develop tight, powerful connections between engineering advanced technologies and developing universal, mathematically rigorous physical theories,” Rocklin said. “We'll be starting from concepts that anyone can get a sense of by looking at or feeling a piece of origami and using robotics and multifunctional 3D printing to create complex, flexible and robust dynamical structures that can do things nobody has ever seen before."
]]>Georgia Tech’s MURIs are both primarily within the School of Physics. First, Simon Sponberg, a Dunn Family Associate Professor of Physics and Biological Sciences, leads a team discovering how animals strategically use sensing and cognition to make decisions in complex environments. The project, Fast, Lexicographic Agile Perception Integrates Decision and Control in a Spike-Resolved, Sensorimotor Program (FLAP), specifically addresses the core DoD topic area of understanding neural systems integration for competent autonomy in decision and control.
“We have all these great, sophisticated algorithms for processing big data, but an animal doesn't have time to process a million samples of its environment and then figure out what’s a predator,” said Sponberg.
Studying moths for their agile, sophisticated flying and complex sensing abilities, the team will record electrical activity in the brain to determine how the moths make decisions and use natural language processing techniques to see how a moth derives meaning from sensory cues and movements. The goal is to develop an information processing framework that enables quick, flexible decision-making that could facilitate the next generation of autonomous bio-inspired systems and better integrate living systems with engineered technologies
The interdisciplinary nature of the team makes complex research possible. Half the team is made of experimentalists: Sponberg specializes in sensors connected to motor systems with precisely timed signals; Jeff Riffell, a professor at the University of Washington, studies how the nervous system processes sensory signals to control behavior; and as a vision neuroscientist at Florida International University, Jamie Theobald, determines how animals parse complex environments. The other half of the team will build the framework: Duke Professor Vahid Tarokh models complex datasets, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Hannah Choi focuses on neural networks, and Cornell Professor Silvia Ferrari ties it all together as a control theorist embedding control in neural structures.
“MURIs were originally training grants for the DoD to develop the next generation of scientists who would make progress,” said Sponberg. “This funding will allow us to have postdocs and graduate students across all six labs and disciplines working together tightly and creating a community.”
For the second MURI, Programming Multistable Origami and Kirigami Structures via Topological Design, Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Zeb Rocklin is part of a team exploring a new class of origami- and kirigami-inspired flexible, lightweight structures capable of transitioning between many stable shapes to perform different tasks or adapt to changing environmental conditions. These structures could be used in a range of applications, from multifunctional robots and collapsible antennae to rapidly assembled bridges and temporary structures, and force protection elements like origami-inspired bulletproof shields.
The team combines experts in mathematics, physics, material science, mechanics, robotics, numerical modeling, and computation, including Harvard University Professors Katie Betoldi, Jennifer Lewis, L. Mahadevan, and Robert Wood, as well as University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Eleni Katifori
The researchers will develop mathematical models to characterize and design the complex mechanical behavior of multi-stable origami and kirigami structures; new scale-spanning manufacturing processes that efficiently integrate actuation and sensing; and experimental test beds to serve as a platform for evaluation and optimization of design concepts.
"This project benefits from Georgia Tech's ability to develop tight, powerful connections between engineering advanced technologies and developing universal, mathematically rigorous physical theories,” Rocklin said. “We'll be starting from concepts that anyone can get a sense of by looking at or feeling a piece of origami and using robotics and multifunctional 3D printing to create complex, flexible and robust dynamical structures that can do things nobody has ever seen before."
]]>The following students were recognized at this year's event:
Donald V. Jackson Fellowship
Shoale Badr, Lohith Burra, Raj Sanjay Shah
Marshall D. Williamson Fellowship
Cole Anderson, Tricia Dang, Abrahim Ladha, Pengda Xie
Outstanding Graduate Head Teaching Assistant Award
Rusty Otomo
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award
Sam Jijina
Outstanding Undergraduate Head Teaching Assistant Award
Mitchell Gacuzana
Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award
Anthony Zheng
The Bellon Award
Katie Marchese and Yihua Xu
Excellence in Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies (ALIS) Award
Ella Tiller
International Affairs Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year
Amelia Rousseau
International Affairs Online Teaching Assistant of the Year
Leslie Dwolatzky
International Affairs Outstanding Graduate Student Award
Brian Stewart
International Affairs Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award
Samuel Ellis
Outstanding Economics Student Award
Samantha Cameron
Outstanding Public Policy Undergraduate Student Award
Archa Amin, Kathryn Earles, Adam Lederer
AIA Medal for Academic Excellence
Weston Byerly and Monica Rizk
AICP Outstanding Student Award
Freyja Brandel-Tanis
Alpha Rho Chi Medal
AnLi French
Industrial Designers Society of America Student Merit Award
Sophia De Lurgio
John and Joyce Caddell Student Merit Award
Blaine Allen and Naomi Censullo
Kim Scott Logan Award
Mir Jeffres
Stanley, Love-Stanley, P.C. Award
Breanna Rhoden and Christian Waweru
Dow Chemical-P.C. McCutcheon Prize for Outstanding Student Achievement in Business
Cindy Qiu
Jennifer R. and Charles B. Rewis Award for Student Excellence in Accounting
Katherine Fishman and Vicky Yang
John R. Battle Award for Student Excellence
Ben Barnett and Kara Pomerantz
Naresh K. Malhotra Scholarship for Marketing Research
Clara McKay
A. Joyce Nickelson and John C. Sutherland Prize
Sarah Eisenstadt
Cynthia L. Bossart and James Efron Scholarship
Sena Ghobadi
Larry S. O’Hara Fellowship
Jason Tsukahara, Youngho Yoo, Pedro Marquez Zacarias
Mehta Phingbodhipakkiya Undergraduate Memorial Scholarship
Nabojeet Das
Roger M. Wartell, Ph.D., and Stephen E. Brossette, M.D., Ph.D. Award for Multidisciplinary Studies in Biology, Physics, and Mathematics
Lila Nassar
Virginia C. and Herschel V. Clanton Jr. Scholarship
Griffin Wagner
Robert A. Pierotti Memorial Scholarship
Holly McCann and Soham Kulkarni
Aerospace Engineering Outstanding Senior Scholar Award
Anonto Zaman
Donnell W. Dutton Outstanding Senior in Aerospace Engineering Award
Stacey Tian
G.D. Jain Outstanding Senior in Biomedical Engineering Award
Kevin McCoy
Outstanding Academic Achievement in Biomedical Engineering Award
Adith Srivasta
S.K. Jain Outstanding Research Award in Biomedical Engineering
Mary Kate Gale
Chair’s Award — Outstanding Chemical and Biomolecular Junior
Ethan Guglielmo
Chair’s Award — Outstanding Chemical and Biomolecular Senior
Christina Whetzel
Buck Stith Outstanding Junior Award in Civil Engineering
Anthony Sanseverino
Buck Stith Outstanding Junior Award in Environmental Engineering
Aidan Labrozzi
Buck Stith Outstanding Senior Award in Civil and Environmental Engineering
Zoe Zhang
School Chair’s Outstanding Senior Award in Civil Engineering
Thomas Papageorge
School Chair’s Outstanding Senior Award in Environmental Engineering
Johanna Hall
Electrical and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Research Award
Pradyot Yadav
Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award
Zachary Olkin
Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award
Katherine Roberts
Alpha Pi Mu Academic Excellence Award
Oscar Aguilar and Xufei Liu
Evelyn Pennington Outstanding Service Award
Hung Doan and Duncan Siebert
Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Excellence in Leadership Award
Dany Shwayri
American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC) Student Chapter Award for Graduating Senior
Alp Kulaksizoglu
School of Materials Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Award
Alp Kulaksizoglu and Matthew Kuner
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Outstanding Scholar Award
Andrew Galassi
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering School Chair’s Award
Joseph Stein
Richard K. Whitehead Jr. Memorial Awards
Julia Binegar, Blake Castleman, Sarah Chen, William Compton, Rebekah Travis
Outstanding Scholastic Achievement Award — Nuclear and Radiological Engineering Program, School of Mechanical Engineering
MaryEmma Hughes
College of Engineering (COE) Honors Awards
Evan Beckley, Denzel Carter, Eliezer Zavala Gonzalez, Zhiyi Li, Matthew Liu,
Bain McHale, Kristina Malinowski, Jana Shade, Taryn Trigler, Sophia Ung, Nick Vu
Davidson Family Tau Beta Pi Senior Engineering Award
Zachary Olkin
Alvin M. Ferst Leadership and Entrepreneur Scholarship Award
Adam Lederer and Chris Ozgo
Naugle Communication Center Assistant of the Year Award
Jose Miranda-Hernandez
Georgia Tech Faculty Women’s Club Scholarships
Alexander Emelianov, Kelly Haas, Ben Howard, Parth Parashar, Shiloh Emma Thomas-Wilkinson
Jordan Lockwood Peer Tutor of the Year Award
Emily Nguyen and Raneem Rizvi
Outstanding Learning Assistant Award
Aboubacar Barrie
Outstanding PLUS Leader Award
Jerry Schweiger
Outstanding Student Assistant Award
Vivi Tran
Outstanding Tutor Award
Raymond Copeland
Provost’s Academic Excellence Award
Kathryn Earles, Jocelyn Kavanagh, Emily Salmond, Conner Yurkon
Love Family Foundation Award
Yashvardhan Tomar
Cognition, the mental process of acquiring, using, and storing knowledge, will continue to dominate Brown’s research, thanks to a two-year funding grant from the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation, which has awarded $20 million since its founding in 2006 to research projects that “will lead to significant advances in medicine or scientific knowledge.”
It's part of a busy season for Brown. In addition to the Curci funding, he's just received a research grant from the National Institute on Aging, and he and members of his lab just published a new study on memory recall and spatial navigation.
The Curci grant “is a great honor,” Brown says. “One of the challenges, especially among young scientists, is having opportunities to do research that’s really on the cutting edge of our field. That’s where it’s more high-risk, high-reward. It’s harder to support big ideas, especially when you’re junior faculty, so this is a great opportunity to get at the forefront of the field’s biggest questions.”
A priority for the Curci Foundation is research dealing with neuroscience and brain science, which lends to the title for Brown’s Curci research project: "Establishing the neural mechanisms behind our cognitive maps through development of a virtual reality and closed-loop neurofeedback platform.”
Cognitive maps are how we view the layout of our physical environment in our minds, and learning more about how we construct them and encode the information in them into memory is key to treating Alzheimer’s and other memory-related disorders, as well as the normal aging process.
What Brown has proposed “could potentially change the way we approach memory research,” he says. Brown wants to combine traditional brain imaging tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) with machine learning in a unique way.
“The idea here would be to develop a neurofeedback system, where essentially if we can read out signatures that the brain is attempting to create, we can feed-back stimuli to the brain that can enhance or strengthen those neural signatures.”
Machine learning would allow this to happen in real time. “It could start to interpret neural signals as they’re coming out of the recording device, rather than the researcher needing to go offline and crunch numbers, which is worthless if you’re trying to change someone’s neural function in situ, or as they’re engaged in it.”
Mind-mapping our environments
In addition to the Curci funding, Brown is also part of a research team whose study, “Episodic memory integration shapes value-based decision-making in spatial navigation”, will soon be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. The team is made up of Georgia Tech School of Psychology and School of Economics researchers, and the accepted manuscript version of the study was published online April 7.
The team includes postdoctoral fellow Qiliang He, research assistants Elizabeth Beveridge, Lou Eschapasse, and Vanessa Vargas, all from the School of Psychology; and doctoral candidate Jancy Liu from the School of Economics. All are members of Brown’s Memory Affect Planning (MAP) Lab.
Spatial navigation — knowing where you are, how you got there, and how to get to another destination — is a key cognitive ability. Brown’s research team wanted to know what factors go into the choices humans make when navigating based on memories. Participants learned where various objects were in a virtual environment, and then decided whether to reach those goals from familiar starting locations or unpredictable ones,
“We created a (computational) model of just how much people were integrating prior experiences into their current choices,” Brown says. “We’re hopeful this is a new tool for the field. It may be used for other types of tasks like interpreting neuroimaging data, for example — how much of this behavior or brain activity is being influenced by prior experiences?”
Brown says the recent study is similar to the kind of research he’ll work on with the Curci funding. “What we want to do in the Curci award is try to strengthen people’s mental maps of their environments. The current theory that people broadly hold is that our cognitive maps of environments really come about by integrating different (memory) episodes. When you have two navigational experiences and they cross paths, you stick them together and you start to build a little map.”
The published study tries to determine how good people are in integrating all their different experiences into their cognitive maps, and the decisions that are then made based on that information. “In the Curci award, we want to try to zoom in on the neural signature of the maps themselves, and try to strengthen them to lead to better performance.”
NIH National Institute on Aging grant
Brown was notified in early May that he had won another cognitive neuroscience-related grant, this one a five-year award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), one of the 27 institutes and research centers that make up the National Institutes of Health.
Brown says the NIA research mission is related to the Curci award. While that grant is more concerned with state-of-the-art method development and understanding cognitive map neural signals by manipulating them, the NIA grant focuses on how the structure of our environment, like the layouts of buildings and roads, is stored by the brain.
“The grant also asks two questions,” Brown adds. “Can we understand individual differences in navigation ability by studying the way our brain stores this structure information? And can differences in how people's spatial memory declines with age be understood in part by how fragmented their neural maps of their environment are?
“This is another huge honor for me. It will support my lab and research program for five years, and combined with the Curci this support touches on many of the big questions about how humans are able to plan and navigate their lives.”
DOI: https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxlm0001133
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35389701/
Funding for the Journal of Experimental Psychology study was provided by the National Institutes of Health and their National Institute on Aging, and the Warren Alpert Foundation.
]]>]]>
The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev with the 2022 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award.
The Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award, sponsored by Vision Research, is given to an early-career vision scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical, or applied. The award selection committee gives highest weight to the significance, originality and potential long-range impact of the work.
The selection committee may also take into account the nominee’s previous participation in VSS conferences or activities, and substantial obstacles that the nominee may have overcome in their careers. The awardee is asked to give a brief presentation of her/his work and is required to write an article to be published in Vision Research.
Associate Professor, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology
The 2022 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev for fundamental contributions to our understanding of perceptual decision making and visual metacognition. Rahnev is an associate professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Harvard University, Rahnev obtained his Ph.D. at Columbia University with Hakwan Lau and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley with Mark D’Esposito.
Rahnev’s research seeks to uncover the computational and neural bases of perceptual decision making. He studies the top-down processes that modulate the normal visual experience, using a combination of neuroimaging, brain stimulation, psychophysics, and computational modeling.
His early pioneering work on attention-related subjective biases has inspired new lines of investigation and stimulated debates among philosophers. In another influential line of studies, Rahnev used a combination of brain stimulation and neuroimaging to demonstrate the existence of a hierarchical structure in the prefrontal cortex such that progressively rostral regions control later stages of perceptual decision making.
His more recent work has uncovered the sources of suboptimality in perceptual decision making and developed improved models of visual metacognition.
Rahnev has received an impressive series of grants from NIH, NSF, and the Office of Naval Research and mentored many graduate students and postdocs. He has also spearheaded several large collaborative efforts, such as creating the Confidence Database and organizing a consensus paper where researchers in visual metacognition agreed on shared goals.
Rahnev’s research exemplifies open and high-quality science that produces fundamental discoveries about how humans make perceptual decisions.
Rahnev will speak during the VSS 2022 Awards session:
Monday, May 16, 2022, 12:30 – 1:45 pm EDT, Talk Room 2
"Perceptual decision making is the process of choosing a course of action based on the available sensory evidence. This process begins with a stimulus that is internally represented in the visual system. Based on the internal representation, a person makes a decision and can also evaluate this decision via a confidence rating.
Progress on perceptual decision making ultimately requires an understanding of the stimulus, the internal representation, the decision, and the confidence in the decision. This talk will focus on recent work that begins to reveal the computations that link all these components together.
I will show how previously unexplained response biases emerge from individual differences in the internal representation. I will also present a new process model of confidence that allows the unbiased measurement of metacognitive ability and fits empirical data better than existing alternatives.
I will end by highlighting exciting new developments in the field that promise to revolutionize our understanding of the computations underlying perceptual decision making."
]]>The episode, “Game Changers,” shows how Ting and her colleagues use a unique moving platform to yank the rug from under subjects in their quest to study movement, human balance and gait, and the complex interplay of the nervous system and musculoskeletal system.
“You don’t think about balance,” Ting says in the episode. “However, it’s a super complex interaction of many parts of your brain, your nervous system, your muscles and sensory system, that is constantly shifting around without your awareness.”
Ting, McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair and professor, also explains how her team collects mountains of data about muscle activity and biomechanical forces alongside data from the brain to deepen our understanding of balance and movement disorders and find new ways to help people suffering from them.
Watch the full episode on the Emory Healthcare website.
]]>Ritika Chanda has made the most of her time at Georgia Tech. Through challenging classes, undergraduate research, leadership roles in student organizations, and an internship, Chanda shares she's ready to enter the healthcare field after graduation.
She encourages all students to take advantage of their time at Tech to get involved in various activities to learn more about their future career path. She shares that “I am someone who strives to challenge myself and try new things,” and her time at Georgia Tech certainly has been full of excitement and discovery.
While serving as president of Student Hospital Connections (SHC), the organization was awarded “Burdell’s Best for Community Champion” award at Tech’s Up with the White and Gold Ceremony. From volunteering at pop-up vaccine clinics, to helping on a Covid-19 helpline, to making masks for local charitable clinics and homeless shelters, service has been a vital part of Chanda’s Georgia Tech experience.
Here are Chanda’s recommendations for “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: What is your degree, year, and hometown?
A: I am a fourth-year Neuroscience major with minors in health and medical sciences and leadership studies. I am from Columbus, Georgia, which is located about two hours south from Atlanta!
Q: What activities are you involved with on campus?
A: On campus, I am involved in several student organizations, research and mentoring. I currently serve as the president of SHC, executive vice president of American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and vice president of Support, Health, and Education (S.H.E) for Women.
SHC is an organization focused on promoting volunteerism and healthcare awareness among Georgia Tech students. Our goal is to provide students interested in leadership and volunteerism with the opportunities and resources to make an impact in our community!
AMSA is an organization with the mission of supporting, informing, and inspiring future physicians to make healthcare a better place. Our goal is to provide support for the academic aspects of being a pre-health student through our workshops and initiatives.
Last, but not least, S.H.E for Women is a newly chartered organization with the mission of spreading awareness to women’s health issues, especially in the realm of homelessness. Our goal is to provide support to larger Atlanta-based organizations with similar missions by advocating for them, informing our Georgia Tech students of these issues, and hosting service projects to help alleviate said issues.
My role in each of organizations involves coordinating the operations of the organizations and most importantly supporting all members in their future endeavors. My goal is to be a resource for others and to share my experiences. As a teaching leader for a Neuroscience GT 1000 course, I have the opportunity to continue this goal as a mentor for first-year students! I also serve as an undergraduate research assistant in professor Eric Schumacher’s Cognitive Neuroscience at Tech Research Lab (CoNTRoL). I am currently completing the research option on my own project investigating whether attentional brain networks, which are neural pathways in the brain modulating attention, can predict learning in an online environment using fMRI techniques!
Off campus, I am involved in several different activities as well. I serve as a medical intern at the Good Samaritan Health Center, or Good Sam, which is a charitable clinic just five minutes away from Georgia Tech. Through this position, I support the hard-working medical staff, while also practicing skills essential for future healthcare providers, such as making patients feel safe and comfortable, managing the demands of healthcare, and being adaptable and flexible. Throughout my four years at Tech, this experience has been the most eye-opening and impactful to me. Before Good Sam, I was blind to many of the issues related to healthcare, such as the effects of healthcare disparities, the lack of healthcare accessibility and more.
This experience inspired me to also be an advocate for more accessible and equitable healthcare and motivated me to use my resources to help spread awareness and educate other Georgia Tech students through AMSA’s Urban Clinic of Atlanta (UCA) team and Student Hospital Connection’s Outreach team. With Good Sam, I also serve as a clinical caller and shift coordinator on their Covid-19 helpline and a volunteer for their Covid-19 and flu pop-up vaccine sites! I also work as a medical scribe for Comprehensive Women’s Care of Columbus (CWCC), a private OBGYN practice in my hometown dedicated to providing accessible and women-focused healthcare. During my free time, I do some dancing here and there!
Q: When did you know you wanted a career in pre-health?
A: When I was about eight years old, my uncle came to live with us while studying for the United States Medical License Exam, which is a three-step examination program to receive your medical license. During this time, my uncle was also responsible for watching me while my parents worked. He would encourage me to study with him by giving me case studies to memorize. I was responsible for learning the patient’s symptoms and history, and then presenting the case to him so he could “diagnose” me. That was the summer I realized I wanted to pursue medicine because connecting with and being able to help others has always been something I have been passionate about! As I grew older, I began seeing the positive and life-changing impact physicians had on individuals, families and groups of people, and my Georgia Tech experience inspired me to use my education to help underserved and uninsured populations receive quality healthcare.
Q: Why did you choose to pursue pre-health at Georgia Tech?
A: When I was a prospective student, I came to tour Georgia Tech. Prior to the tour, I was quite hesitant in coming to Tech for pre-health, but very quickly I realized that Georgia Tech was located in a vibrant community full of opportunities just steps away from campus! Additionally, I am someone who strives to challenge myself and try new things. I value personal growth and I knew Georgia Tech would help facilitate that for me. I am really thankful for choosing to come here for my undergraduate experience.
Q: What resources at Georgia Tech have prepared you for a pre-health career?
A: Student organizations and the Pre-Health Advising Office have been really impactful in preparing me for my pre-health career. Through student organizations, I found an open and welcoming community, as well as support from my upperclassmen peers. As a current upperclassman participating in student organizations, I am grateful to be able to provide support those still learning about the path! The Pre-Health Advising Office has been crucial in supporting me academically as I pursue this path. They have many programs to help assist through the process and are always available during their drop-in hours to talk. Talking about your career can be really stressful and make you feel vulnerable, but the Office does a great job with building relationships with students, so you have a safe place to go to for career-related discussions.
Q: What have some of your favorite classes at Georgia Tech been and why?
A: One of my favorite classes to participate in was Vertical Integrated Projects (VIP). During my first and second year at Tech, I joined a VIP regarding Health Informatics on FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. This project was heavily industrial engineering-based, but very interesting! I appreciated learning about how other fields, especially engineering, could improve healthcare.
As a leadership studies minor, I am required to delve a little bit into management and business, which led me to taking MGT 3662, Management in the Healthcare Sector. This course was extremely eye-opening as it exposed me to many conflicts in healthcare and delved into how business and technology make an impact on the patient experience. I would highly recommend this course to pre-health students! I am currently taking the practicum portion of this course and working closely with the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to help resolve an issue they are currently facing using the skills I have learned in MGT 3662 and my experience working in and learning more the healthcare field.
I also really enjoyed taking physics for life sciences and organic chemistry, as these courses challenged me the most! In the end, despite the challenge, I realized how much they helped me improve my critical thinking skills. Additionally, it was great seeing how they could be applied in medicine and pharmaceuticals to improve healthcare.
Q: What professors, advisors, or older students have helped you prepare for your career?
A: During my first semester at Georgia Tech, my GT 1000 and PSYC 1101 professor Mary Holder played a huge role in helping me adapt to college life. With her support, I learned the necessary time management and study skills needed to succeed at Georgia Tech. This also gave me the opportunity to try out other interests of mine inspired by Tech, such as industrial engineering through a VIP program and my leadership studies minor! I am really thankful for the support of my family, friends, and academic and career advisors!
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
If it wasn’t for her dad’s encouragement, Jenna Nash may never have applied to Georgia Tech. After her admission to Tech, Nash says the resources available for pre-health students at Tech felt like “the missing puzzle piece that fell in place” when deciding what college to attend.
Four years and countless memories later, the Canton, Georgia native graduated in May 2021 with a degree in neuroscience and a minor in health and medical sciences. From her involvement in the Physician Assistant Club as a member and vice president of marketing, to support from peers, professors, and the Neuroscience Club, Nash shares that coming to campus was “the best decision I have ever made.”
Her time at Georgia Tech helped Nash achieve her goal of physician assistant (PA) school. This semester, she begins classes at Mercer University for the Master of Medical Science (MMSc) degree.
Here are Nash’s tips on “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: Why did you decide to pursue pre-health at Georgia Tech?
A: I knew going into college that I wanted to pursue a pre-health career, but Tech actually helped secure my decision to become a physician assistant. I was weighing heavily between nurse practitioner, which requires a complete Bachelor of Nursing, then going back to school to become a nurse practitioner for around two years; versus physician assistant, where you can choose your own undergraduate degree and then complete around 27 months of school; versus doctor, which requires a complete undergraduate degree then four or more years of school depending on specialty.
While choosing what school to attend, I knew I wanted to stay in state because of financial reasons, but most schools in Georgia that offered nursing programs did not seem challenging enough to me.
My dad actually encouraged me to apply to Tech, even though I thought there was no way I would get in, and I didn't think it had a huge pre-health program. However, checked all the boxes – challenging, football team, great location – so when I got in, I knew that it was meant to be. From there, I decided to become a physician assistant instead of a doctor because of a mentor in high school that told me about the flexibility and freedom that comes with becoming a PA instead of doctor – then, I knew it was for me. Additionally, I found out there was a club for pre-physician assistant students at Tech which sealed the deal. It was kind of my missing puzzle piece that fell in place. It was the best decision I have ever made.
Q: What resources did you use at Georgia Tech to support your career aspirations, such as clubs, advisors, or supportive professors?
A: One of the best resources for me during my time at Tech was the Physician Assistant Club (PAC). It is tricky navigating how to get into graduate school and it was getting super overwhelming trying to figure it out on my own. My pre-health advisor, Maria Krakovski, and one of my sisters in my sorority, Claudia Varnedoe, encouraged me to join PAC. I am so happy that I did! It helped me figure out what I needed to do while in college, allowed me to form connections with other people that aspired to become PAs, gave me job and volunteering options, and walked me through the application process which was so helpful when it came time to apply for schools my senior year.
One of the best things that came from PAC was the opportunity to work with Good Shepherd’s Clinic, which provided healthcare to uninsured people of Atlanta. At this clinic, I learned how much I loved working with underserved populations and learned a lot about the inequality in the healthcare system of Georgia and the United States.
Another thing I am so thankful for was one-on-one tutoring through the Tutoring & Academic Support Office at the Clough Undergraduate Commons (CULC). I was studying there nearly three times a week for help on subjects that I could not figure out for the life of me. It increased my confidence in my ability to solve problems and allowed me to reflect on what I really understood. Tutoring is a very underused resource at Tech, and I cannot encourage people to take advantage of the tutoring resources enough!
Q: How did Georgia Tech help you during the application cycle for graduate school? Any tips that process?
A: I am so thankful that I had Georgia Tech resources available during my application cycle. I used lots of the available resources, especially when it came to writing my personal statement. I took advantage of the Communication Center to edit my essay a lot. They really helped to critique and organize my thoughts. Writing has always been a weakness of mine, because I write just like I talk, and my message can get confusing; they went through it with me sentence by sentence to make sure every word in my essay was meaningful.
I put to use every bit of knowledge I gained from PAC during the application process. I utilized other students in the Club that I made connections with to review my application and make sure that I did not miss any small details. I encourage students to take advantage of peers with similar goals to share the stress of the application cycle with, because they are an invaluable resource.
Q: What graduate degree are you pursuing and where? Why did you choose that program?
A: I am studying to become a physician assistant (PA) at Mercer University. I knew from high school I wanted to become a physician assistant because of my desire to form connections with patients while still having time to enjoy life outside of my career. I chose the PA program at Mercer because of its proximity to Atlanta. During my time at Tech, I became connected to the city and realized how much it has to provide. But, living in Atlanta and through my involvement at Tech, I also noticed the large population of people in need of healthcare, shelter, food, and more. Since Mercer focuses on service opportunities, I thought this would be a great way for me to give back to the city I learned so much from in college.
Q: What advice do you have for current Georgia Tech pre-health students?
A: Get as many healthcare experiences as possible that you can while you are at Tech. In Atlanta you have access to many different fields – take advantage of that! Try different things, because each thing you do will give you more information and shape your future as a healthcare provider. During those experiences, keep a journal of conversations, patients, or advice that make an impact on you. This will help you in future interviews, when writing your personal statements, or talking about your career. And it is fun to look back at it all when you are questioning whether you have chosen the correct path for yourself.
One of the most important pieces of advice that was given to me is: this is the only time in your healthcare journey where you will get the opportunity to see how different providers handle situations differently. Take advantage of shadowing experiences to determine how you will act as a healthcare provider in the future.
Lastly, develop a network of people that have a career path that is similar to you. For me I had three main people: someone who already was working in the field, someone currently in my chosen graduate program, and then someone that was at the same stage as myself. Having these people to go to with “stupid” questions was so useful and really eased my stress about the whole application process. In my experience, people are flattered when you ask them for help because it makes them feel important, so don’t be afraid to reach out!
Q: What makes Georgia Tech special?
A: I had the best four years of my life at Georgia Tech, and I am forever thankful for everything I learned from my professors, friends, and peers. It was challenging, but at the end of the day, you come out of Tech ready to accomplish anything that is ahead of you. Cherish the moments getting to learn in such a stimulating academic environment. You were chosen to be at this school for a reason.
Feel free to reach out to me if you ever need advice or encouragement! I’m always available. Email Jenna Nash.
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
Meet Alonzo Whyte
As a faculty member, advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences (HMED) Minor, and director of academic advising for the Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience at Georgia Tech, Alonzo Whyte supports pre-health students throughout their time at Tech. He also teaches neuroscience and serves as a development leader in the School of Biological Sciences, working to incorporate feedback on the program and support future growth through curriculum development, course instruction, and academic advising. Whyte is also a member of the College of Sciences Task Force on Racial Equity and in spring 2021 received the Institute’s Class of 1934 Course Instructor Opinion Survey Award.
In his tenure at Tech, Whyte says he has seen a diversity of routes that students take on the path to a pre-health career. Today he shares some advice on success stories, mistakes to avoid, and resources to explore.
Here’s his take on “How to Pre-Health” at Georgia Tech:
Q: What is your role advising students on the Pre-Health Track?
A: As a neuroscience advisor and an advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences Minor, I see a lot of students on the Track for anything from medical school, to physician assistant school, to dental school, to physical therapy school, and everything in between. We try our best as advisors to have some knowledge in terms of what steps the students need to take in order to meet the pre-requisite requirements for different programs, because it’s not simple.
There is no pre-medical major at Georgia Tech. Students need to do research to find out what specific programs they’re interested in and what classes they need to meet their goals. In that capacity, as an advisor for the major and the minor, I have developed some knowledge in terms of what classes students should be taking for the different paths.
But really, my job is to ensure that their completed courses help students towards progress for their major or minor, and wrapped into that are the pre-health requirements. And even though I have some experience and knowledge about what things students are doing to prepare for their post-graduate experience, I strongly, strongly recommend that every student talk to the Pre-Health Advising Office. They have a set of advisors there that are dedicated to helping the writing medical school letters, interviewing, and anything else needed.
For example, last week I was part of a mock medical school interview process. The Pre-Health Office creates those types of events. As major and minor advisors, we ensure the students' academic course work will earn their desired degree and that students’ courses are getting applied appropriately, while edging them along the pre-health path.
Q: What other key resources are there for students on the pre-health path?
A: Again, the Pre-Health Office is fantastic. They’re very busy, so to get a meeting with their advisors such as Mr. Castelan or Ms. Liggins, it’s important to book in advance.
Additionally, advisors are still not the only experts in what the students need. I find that the best solution is to utilize peer advisors as well as a student groups. The Pre-Health Office has many resources; they have their own set of peer advisors; they have a very active Piazza page, that allows you to connect with the pre-health community to get quick answers to your pre-health questions; and they have a list of pre-health student organizations.
I’m also a faculty advisor for a new club, the American Physician Scientist Association. They are students who are looking to be physicians, scientists, or something similar. They’ll have speakers come who are focused on that subject.
Additionally, I am faculty advisor for Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students. It’s not just limited to minority identity students, it’s a very diverse group of students and open to all. This semester they hosted a medical school showcase where they had representatives from different medical schools come and talk the attendees through the application process.
There’s also an American Medical Student Association, a Pre-Dental Society, and many more places where you can connect with senior students who are going through the application cycle, as well as participate in their events where they bring in guest or representatives of medical schools to provide great insight. The pre-health path is really a collaborative process.
There’s not one single resource. You have to pick and choose what resources you need. If you have questions about classes, I’ll be a person to talk to. If you have questions about the application cycle, you can talk to me, but I’ll refer you to the Pre-Health Office as they have all these peer advisors, all these student associations. The community is great, and there are plenty of supportive resources.
Q: In your experience, what kind of activities do students on the Pre-Health Track do to ensure they take the right steps to pursue the rigorous process of applying to these difficult schools?
A: I think one of the biggest things is thinking beyond GPA and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) score. While those are important factors for the application, currently the holistic view of the student is huge. There are some shifts and trends in the application experience.
I would say many students are waiting a year or two after their undergraduate graduation as a way to build up their credentials. Maybe they need more clinical hours, or they’re taking positions as a medical assistant, Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), things like that, to get hands-on experience to show that they can thrive in a medical environment. Maybe they don’t have the strongest GPA, so they’ll do a one- or two-year master’s in something like genetics to show that they can achieve academically and handle the rigor of medical school.
Three important things that students do are leadership positions, getting involved in clubs, and research.
Showing commitment to clubs is important by staying active not just for one semester but two or three years if possible. Additionally, research is becoming popular. Working in biomedical, neuroscience, chemistry, or other research lab shows that students can commit to a project that’s high-level science. We have these opportunities at Georgia Tech where students can successfully write a thesis, get some publications or poster presentations.
That’s a lot of what I see for strong candidates – along with maintaining a good attitude throughout that all, because when recommendation letters are written, it won’t matter how much you’ve done if you’ve had a sour attitude the whole time! As advisors, we want to ensure that we’re putting students in the position to become a good clinician. When we’re thinking about who we’re sending to medical school, we think, who do we want to be treated by when we’re older? Do I want some student who is grumpy, even if they’re the smartest? That’s one of the reasons for graduate school interviews – personality does matter for who you choose as your doctor.
Q: For students who are on the Pre-Health Track, but have a major that is not explicitly science related, how does their path differentiate from students studying a healthcare related subject?
A: The College of Sciences majors, in particular neuroscience and biology, have a lot of pre-health courses already built into the major requirements … Whereas if you’re studying computer science or engineering, you don’t have the lab science requirements built into the degree the same way. You have other courses you must take, so you have to find a place in your schedule to fit the pre-health courses in.
For students studying biomedical engineering, for example, because of the heavy credit requirements to complete that major, students are often really stretched to find every free elective that completes a pre-health requirement … So, there’s a bit more pressure.
There are plenty of non-science students who attend medical school after graduation successfully. In fact, some schools are looking for students with diverse skill sets. For example, some schools want engineering students who want to be doctors, because that’s how they design medical devices well.
Q: What would you tell prospective students interested in pursuing a pre-health career through Georgia Tech?
A: The rigor of Georgia Tech has a national, if not international, reputation. You leave Georgia Tech prepared for the rigor of medical school. That’s what we hear from our students who have gone off to places like Emory for a medical degree – they say that Georgia Tech prepared them to excel and succeed in their medical school courses. You can go to many different institutions and earn high marks, but you’re going to get your world turned over when you go off to medical school. The struggle is helpful, because you build skills to succeed while struggling, and then when you step up to the challenge of medical school, you’re ready for it.
Q: What other advice do you have for students on the Pre-Health Track to ensure they have a successful time here?
A: Again, I think it’s important that students don’t focus solely on GPA. A “C” is not the end of your pre-health path. A “D” is not even the end of your pre-health path. Think about the whole picture. There are plenty of students who struggle their first year and that’s expected. So, you have to adjust, and have some grace there, understanding that there’s more to the process than GPA.
I also encourage students, regardless of if they’re straight “A” students or straight “B” students, to have an open mindset to other careers. You may have come to Georgia Tech thinking that you want to be pre-health, but I would suggest still exploring other paths. Consider, “What if I were to start my career with a bachelor’s degree and not go to medical school, what would I do? What would I enjoy?” And then tailor their minor towards that. For example, if they like programming, pursue a Computer Science Minor. If they like writing science communication, a Language, Media, and Communications Minor. There are many things they can do in addition to their major, along with the pre-health requirements. So, if they get to graduation and decide they don’t want to go to medical school, they have something that they’re also equally excited about.
Some of the best medical school applicants I've seen have had activities like projects where they worked in conjunction with local hospitals to design new algorithms for them to read how patients are treated upon arrival. That’s taking their interests and putting in into this pre-health context. And that you would be great for public health, if they decide they don’t want to pursue a medical doctorate. A multimodal, diverse skill set is really important to think outside the box of what it means to be a typical pre-med student, to move to being something more creative and unique.
Q: My last question is a little more personal to you. What do you like about advising for the Health and Medical Sciences minor?
A: I love the energy that students bring. The HMED minor requirements are flexible, diverse and very interdisciplinary – similar to the Neuroscience major. We have students taking classes in science, bioethics, and any of the College of Sciences programs. I love seeing the diversity of classes that they pull together and the interesting things that they’re doing. And I think that the freedom to explore these interdisciplinary courses is important. They really choose their own adventure to complete the minor.
Just to show how varied the minor is, you could complete the HMED minor and not take a single class that is a pre-requisite for medical school. If you’re a neuroscience student also interested in physics and psychology, you could take those courses through the minor, none of which will serve as pre-health requirements. So, people can cater the minor to what their future path may be.
]]>Editor: Audra Davidson
Science Communications
College of Sciences
Pre-Health at Tech:
prehealth.gatech.edu
A third-year graduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, Watson struggles with a form of the autoimmune disease, which causes hair loss and is two to six times more prevalent in Black women, like her, than in other people.
Personal experience drove her to study the mechanisms underlying alopecia, and in so doing, Watson has inspired a new project and focus area in the lab of Coulter BME Professor Cheng Zhu. It’s one of four early-stage projects launched by the Department last year aimed at developing new tools for studying diseases that disproportionately affect people of African descent.
Ultimately, the research teams hope to develop animal models that will more closely replicate the risk factors and social determinants of health common among Black Americans. Each received a $25,000 seed grant, “to get us started in applying our expertise to address a very big challenge,” said Ed Botchwey, who developed the program with fellow Coulter BME faculty member Johnna Temenoff.
“Developing these systems that can model the underlying causes of health disparities will eventually allow us to bring the different aspects of biomedical engineering to bear,” added Botchwey, an associate professor. “I’m looking forward to seeing how the seed grant support has impacted these researchers and what they’ve been able to do so far.”
Botchwey will get his chance April 18 at the Symposium on Health Disparities, when the four research teams will present their work so far. The event also will include the Academy of Medicine Distinguished Lecture from University of Connecticut Professor Cato Laurencin, who basically launched the field of regenerative engineering. He’ll talk more about diminishing racial disparities in healthcare and biomedical research.
“He’s the consummate physician-scientist,” Botchwey said. “I think he’ll address the efforts we can make to not only impact health disparities but perhaps also what so many of us were desperate for during the season of protest: making real progress in the area of racial equity. He’ll speak powerfully to that, and we’ll hear his perspective on the challenges in front of us.”
But first, attendees will be briefed on the challenges that the four Coulter Department research teams are tackling right now:
Cheng Zhu, principal investigator; Loren Krueger, Emory University, co-investigator
Alopecia is an autoimmune disorder in which T cells mistakenly attack hair follicles, and to develop a better disease model, Zhu’s team has to figure out why. Zhu credited Watson with moving the lab in this direction.
“Valencia convinced us,” said Zhu, Regents Professor and J. Erskine Love Chair in Engineering in the Coulter Department. His lab studies how immune cells sense, respond to, and adapt in a dynamic environment while being buffeted by natural mechanical forces in the body.
“We’ve used our approach to study T cells in tumor immunology [and] infection, but not autoimmune diseases,” Zhu said. “So we think it’s a good idea to include alopecia areata, because it’s one of the most prevalent autoimmune disorders in the world.”
Watson said she wasn’t totally convinced that her condition was an autoimmune disorder at first, because there is no evident antigen activity to incite the T cells. That’s given the research team something to look for. Watson sees it as, “an opportunity to contribute to the research by first identifying what is activating the T cells.”
Their work to this point has manifested in a perspective article, with Watson and fellow grad student Makala Faniel as lead authors, discussing the potential for mechanobiology and mechanoimmunology “to contribute to alopecia research by adding new methods, new approaches, and new ways of thinking,” they wrote.
Karmella Haynes, principal investigator; Curtis Henry, Emory University, co-investigator
When the seed grant program was announced, Haynes’ lab was already at work developing an engineered protein to activate genes that are silenced in triple negative breast cancer cells, and she was working with Henry’s lab on developing epigenetics experiments for another type of cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“Dr. Henry had done some exciting work showing how obese-associated serum affected epigenetics and gene expression,” said Haynes, an assistant professor. “We started thinking about how to translate this research to triple negative breast cancer, which disproportionately kills African American women.”
They are two very different forms of cancer, but their project is investigating how the biochemistry of serum in obese patients might affect epigenetic states in breast cancer, and make the disease more aggressive and deadly.
“Once we understand this, we can artificially reprogram the epigenetic state and block cancer cell replication and the formation of new tumors in other parts of the body,” Haynes said.
Led by postdoctoral fellow Cara Shields, the Haynes lab will share new data at the symposium, showing how fat cells can actually prevent cancer cell death by silencing the genes that would otherwise activate a suicide switch or prevent the cancer from spreading.
While they haven’t created the animal model that replicates these conditions yet, Haynes and her collaborators are currently applying for a major external grant and plan to publish their results. First, they want to complete their investigation of gene silencing and demonstrate how epigenetic engineering can be used to activate the affected genes.
“We are working on making our approach, ‘epigenome actuation,’ more clinically translatable to cancer and generally applicable to other diseases that affect cell development,” Haynes said.
C. Ross Ethier, principal investigator; Michael Anderson, University of Iowa, and Michael Hauser, Duke University, are collaborators
Black people are three to four times more likely to develop glaucoma than people of Asian or European descent, and it progresses faster: People of African descent are six times more likely to go blind. Cydney Wong, a Ph.D. student who has taken the lead on this research in the Ethier lab, knows this all too well.
“My grandmother, who I grew up with, has glaucoma, so I have a personal interest in this disease,” Wong said. “I’ve watched as her vision gradually declined. At this point she is almost completely blind.”
Her grandmother is 90 and loves hearing about Wong’s research, which is now focused on a certain genetic risk factor associated with people of African descent all over the globe.
“Our project is investigating whether a mouse expressing this genetic risk factor exhibits glaucomatous damage in its eye,” Wong said. “However, I think the more big-picture goal would be to better understand why glaucoma tends to progress so quickly in people of African descent so that we can develop treatments to prevent vision loss in these patients.”
Michelle LaPlaca, principal investigator; Levi Wood, mechanical engineering, Georgia Tech, co-investigator
LaPlaca has spent the better part of her career studying traumatic brain injury (TBI) from multiple angles, to understand the underlying mechanisms during and following an injury. The idea is to develop better strategies for diagnosis and treatment.
With this project, she’s also attempting to probe the risk factors that can make TBI worse, to gain a deeper understanding of why some underrepresented groups, such as African Americans, with TBI are significantly more likely to have post-injury complications.
LaPlaca’s team is piecing together how chronic stressors and dietary factors, which have not been applied together for the study of TBI animal models before, may influence outcomes.
“I’ve been very interested in the heterogeneous factors that contribute to traumatic brain injury complications,” said LaPlaca, who was inspired somewhat by a meeting of the National Neurotrauma Society last year. “We held a session for the first time on health disparities in TBI, in which we discussed rural-urban disparities, race disparities, and social determinants. It was very timely and re-energized my interest in this area of research.”
Basically, her team is working to develop a state of stress before injury, “a new direction for me,” LaPlaca said. “But I think it’s really critical that we start to use some of these more complicated models in our animal research to complement clinical and public health efforts.”
]]>The committee selected Jaydev Desai for the 2022 Senior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award and Cassie Mitchell for the Junior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.
Both have made bachelor’s degree students a priority in their labs, giving them opportunities to work with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and to help produce peer-reviewed research publications.
“I am deeply passionate about mentoring our terrific undergraduate students in research and guiding them through their academic journey at Georgia Tech,” said Desai, G.P. “Bud” Peterson and Valerie H. Peterson Professor in Pediatric Research. “It is gratifying to see some of the undergraduates from my Medical Robotics and Automation Lab land a job in prestigious Fortune 500 companies. Equally gratifying is to see some of the students who have gone through the research experience in my lab pursue a higher academic degree.”
The awards recognize faculty members at Georgia Tech who have demonstrated sustained achievement in mentoring undergraduates in research activities. For Mitchell, that started when she was a research engineer in Coulter BME and continued after she became a tenure-track faculty member.
“This award is such an honor, because undergraduate research is a true passion of mine, both personally and professionally,” said Mitchell, assistant professor in the Coulter Department. “Receiving this award also illustrates that my mentoring and unique undergraduate research program is of great value to Georgia Tech.”
Mitchell said she often has dozens of undergrad students working in her lab, and like Desai’s group, they often secure positions in industry and prestigious graduate programs after they’ve worked in her lab.
“I often say that, while I do not have biological children of my own, I have an extraordinary number of scientific offspring. And my students, both graduate and undergraduate, are like family to me,” Mitchell said. “When I see them publish or get awards, I am like a parent hollering loudly from the stands.”
]]>The award honors up to six assistant professors each year who have demonstrated excellence and innovation in the classroom and a passion for teaching. They also have made a difference in their students’ lives or made connections between research and teaching.
“I love seeing students rise to the challenge of creative problem solving,” said Singer, McCamish Foundation Early Career Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “I push students to think outside the box, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing them realize that with hard work and brainstorming, they can generate new ways to solve important problems.”
In nomination materials, students praised Singer for her dedication to creating courses that inspired them to give their best, even when they didn’t know all the answers. Several credited her courses with helping them discover a passion for neuroscience or a desire to pursue graduate school.
“[The] assignments brought out the best in everyone the way few group projects do: my classmates and I found ourselves capitalizing on each other’s diverse skill sets to create concepts that pushed barriers. It was the thrill of experiencing what scientific innovation felt like for the first time that was perhaps the biggest takeaway from her course,” one student wrote. “The excitement I felt thinking of ideas for her course was a substantial inspiration for me to pursue graduate school. The work I am proudest of from my entire undergraduate career was done in her course, and I have referred back to it many times.”
One student wrote that Singer’s classrooms are exciting places, where intellectual curiosity is high and all of the students strive to give their best. Others praised Singer for seamlessly transitioning her courses to virtual or hybrid options during the pandemic — and for keeping a close eye on her students’ well-being.
“The flexibility and empathy Dr. Singer conveyed to all of us alleviated our stress for outside factors during a complex time in our college careers,” the student wrote.
Singer teaches courses like BMED 4853, Systems Physiology, and BMED 4803/NEUR 4803, Introduction to Neuroengineering, a course she developed to fill a gap in the Department’s curriculum for students.
“It's very nice to be recognized because I try to implement the kind of classes I would want to take as a student,” Singer said.
]]>From then on, Markowitz was hooked on understanding how the brain controls motor sequencing.
In March, Markowitz became the newest faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, where he will continue to unravel how the brain controls action with a combination of computational, engineering, and biological approaches.
“The same brain circuits that control action selection also, when they go awry, lead to debilitating disorders, such Parkinson’s disease. We hope that through advancing our understanding the function and logic of these circuits, and through engineering new approaches to controlling their activity, we can pave the way toward new therapeutics for neurological disease,” Markowitz said.
Some of his primary work is exploring the potential of deep brain stimulation to help patients with neurological disease.
“It seems reasonable to assume that one pattern [of stimulation] might work in one context, and a completely different pattern might be required in another. So, a primary thrust in my lab is to develop new closed-loop approaches to deep brain stimulation,” Markowitz said. “We want to use machine learning to rapidly detect the state of the brain and the body, and then deliver tailored stimulation in response.”
Markowitz recently finished his postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Ph.D. at Boston University and his bachelor’s at Johns Hopkins University.
]]>Election to fellow means Shella Keilholz, Wilbur Lam, and Ankur Singh are considered among the most accomplished professionals in the field: Fellows represent just the top 2% of medical and biological engineers in the nation, according to the organization more commonly known as AIMBE.
“Being elected as a fellow of AIMBE is one of the most significant honors of my career,” said Lam, a physician and professor in the Coulter Department and the Emory Department of Pediatrics. “Almost every fellow in AIMBE right now, including faculty from our own Department here at Emory and Georgia Tech, is a biomedical engineering hero of mine.”
Keilholz echoed that sentiment and said she is looking forward to engaging with other fellows.
“What impresses me most about AIMBE is the expectation that fellows give back to society and advocate for science. I’m honored to be part of a group that is dedicated to making the world better,” Keilholz said.
Singh called his election as an AIMBE fellow “pivotal to my academic career. It will now allow me to work with a cohort of dedicated scientists toward developing and implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education, research, and advocacy for research funding.”
Singh is an associate professor in Coulter BME and Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. His research lab creates biomaterials-based immune tissues to mimic the structure and function of lymph nodes so they can study interactions between cells and cell decision-making. These models are tiny 3D tissue cultures grown from patient cells called organoids, or “on-chip” systems that draw inspiration from circuits on a microchip to create tiny channels and chambers on silicon wafers that recreate the flow and forces of tissues in the body.
Keilholz, a professor in the Coulter Department, also has been serving as interim associate chair for faculty development. Her work connects neuroscience, signal processing, and complex systems analysis to develop imaging methods to study networks of activity in the brain and provide tools to diagnose and treat clinical manifestations of brain dysfunction. The AIMBE College of Fellows also highlighted her work increasing inclusivity in science.
Lam’s lab integrates micro- and nanotechnology and experimental hematology and oncology to study, diagnose, and treat blood disorders, cancer, and childhood diseases. He also leads the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point-of-Care Technology Center, which has played a key role in validating the accuracy of Covid-19 at-home tests for the National Institutes of Health.
Lam called himself a late-blooming biomedical engineer, which makes fellowship in AIMBE all the more special, he said. Lam didn’t major in engineering in college and was a physician-in-training before he became “enamored by the field,” and only went back to pursue a Ph.D. in bioengineering after his pediatrics residency.
“As such, to receive this bona fide biomedical engineering accolade by the top biomedical engineering society is especially humbling and gratifying for me,” Lam said.
Becoming a fellow of AIMBE is increasingly difficult, and it comes with expectations, as Keilholz noted: The organization expects fellows to give back, advance excellence, and advocate for medical and biological engineering.
Singh said the competitiveness of the selection process for new fellows is not lost on him, and he is grateful for the opportunity to contribute.
“Election to AIMBE underscores the importance of thinking outside the box and championing transformative interdisciplinary research,” he said. “I am fortunate that the outstanding environment at Georgia Tech and my collaborations with Emory Medicine, among others, continue to provide a fertile ground for pushing cutting-edge research.”
Singh, Lam, and Keilholz join more than two dozen current Coulter Department faculty members as AIMBE Fellows, including former chair Susan Margulies, who has served as chair of the AIMBE College of Fellows for 2021. Several of the association’s fellows are Nobel Laureates, and many are members of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.The 2022 class of fellows also includes another Georgia Tech researcher: Omer Inan, associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of Coulter BME's Ph.D. program faculty.
The new class of fellows will be inducted officially at the organization’s annual meeting in March.
]]>Just as highway departments study vehicle traffic flow, Georgia Tech and Emory researcher Bilal Haider is studying neural traffic in the brain to understand the holdups, and his discoveries could lead to therapeutic techniques to “unjam” the flow of neural information.
Now the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is supporting his efforts. In December, Haider received one of 17 SFARI Pilot Awards, part of a $5 million national initiative supporting exploratory ideas with the potential to transform autism spectrum disorder research.
“This will be one of the first studies to test the idea that, because ‘traffic’ is slowed at multiple points in the brain, visual messages never get to the final destination to cause an action on time,” said Haider, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Typical studies only focus on one area at a time. This one will be among the first to try and connect all the major dots along the route.”
Haider’s lab will use the three-year, $300,000 grant to comprehensively measure neural activity in mice while they view, process, and respond to visual stimuli. The idea, Haider said, is to develop a full picture of visual brain area activity using neural probe technology developed in part by his former colleagues at University College London. The probes will target each visual destination on the map to track electrical firing along the neural route.
The team will first identify a network of specialized visual brain areas — up to eight distinct regions — using a 20-year-old standard technique called blood flow imaging. The researchers have developed a way to make the skull transparent and image brain blood flow, basically using glass windows and a compound called cyanoacrylate.
“It’s Krazy Glue, essentially, and it keeps the skull healthy and intact so that we can later make really stable and uncompromised neural recordings with electrical probes in all of the destinations on the map, across several days or even weeks of recordings,” Haider said.
This kind of investigation with delicate neural probes in the brain would be difficult if the skull was removed in a mouse that is awake, breathing, and moving while performing a visual task.
The imaging tracks the amount of oxygen in blood by measuring how much light gets reflected back from the brain. So, with a high-speed camera and a bright red light focused on the brain surface, Haider’s team will measure the active versus inactive areas of the brain that demand oxygenated blood.
Using this system while showing the mouse strong flashing and moving visual stimuli, the researchers can find the active visual areas of the brain and build a map of the visual brain areas. The team will study both typical, wildtype mice, and also mice that have been engineered to have the same genetic mutation as some people with autism.
“Our goal is to measure how networks of neurons across these eight brain areas might miscommunicate, or get lost along the route, and lead to impairments of visual perception in the autism model mice,” Haider said. “We expect that the flow of visual information — the neural ‘traffic’ on the map — during visual task performance in the autism model mice will be slower and less orderly than in the typical wildtype mice.”
The findings of this research could help in the development of new therapeutic techniques to “unjam” the traffic at the key points of the route and speed up or restore behavioral performance.
“A longer-term application would be to connect with clinicians and human brain researchers who study individuals with autism,” Haider said. “Then we could see if EEG or functional MRI activity in people with autism also shows evidence of neural traffic jams along the same visual routes, and if these correlate with visual disturbances or poorer visual behaviors. We could also test promising therapeutics in mice to see if they ‘unjam’ traffic and improve behavior.”
Contact
Jerry Grillo
Communications
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Related Links
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To do this kind of work, researchers need a reliable “map” of all the visual brain areas with specific coordinates for each unique brain. Drawing the map requires monitoring and recording data from an active, working brain, which usually means creating a window in the skull to watch blood flow activity.
Haider’s team has developed a better approach — a new kind of window that’s more stable and allows for longer-term studies. The assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University explains how in a paper published in February in Scientific Reports, an open access forum of Nature publishing.
To get a clear image of the brain’s visual network, Haider’s lab uses an established technique called blood flow imaging, which tracks oxygen in the blood, measuring the active and inactive areas of a mouse brain while the animal views visual stimuli. To capture a strong blood flow signal, researchers typically create a cranial window by thinning the skull or removing a piece of it altogether. These procedures can diminish stability in the awake, pulsing brain — detrimental conditions for delicate electrophysiological measurements made in the same visual areas after imaging.
“Standard windows give really good pictures of the vasculature,” Haider said. “But the downside is, if you’re working with an animal learning how to perform a sophisticated task that requires weeks of training, and you want to do neural recordings from the brain later, that area has been compromised if the skull is missing or thinned out.”
The team’s new cranial window system allows for high-quality blood flow imaging and stable electrical recordings for weeks or even months. The secret is a surgical glue called Vetbond — which contains cyanoacrylate, the same compound that’s in Krazy Glue — and a tiny glass window.
Basically, a thin layer of the glue is applied to the skull with a micropipette and a curved glass coverslip is placed on top of that. The cyanoacrylate creates a “transparent skull” effect. Haider’s team developed the new window system and then vetted the accuracy of the resulting visual brain maps.
“Sometimes the simplest things work. The glue creates a barrier allowing all of the normal physiological processes underneath to carry on, but leaving the bone transparent,” Haider said. “It’s like putting a protector on your smartphone. The protector is over the glass surface, but everything underneath stays crystal clear and functioning.”
Haider’s approach will help his team accomplish their larger goals — to measure the activity of neurons in the brain’s visual pathways and understand how neural traffic jams diminish our visual attention, and how these processes may contribute to visual impairments in people with autism. It’s work that’s getting a boost, thanks to recent support of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.
Haider said proper study of brain function requires repeatable measurements of neural activity, so he has made the new window system publicly available.
“We think this will be useful tool for other researchers,” he said. “We made the code, all the hardware, all the specs of the system, everything, totally public so that other people can try it themselves. We designed this to use in our study of the visual brain, but it can potentially be used to study other brain areas in a way that allows researchers to do long-term experiments while keeping the brain stable and healthy.”
This work was supported by the Whitehall Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (grant Nos. NS107968 and NS109978), and a grant from the Simons Foundation (SFARI 600343). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
CITATION: A. Nsiangani, J. Del Rosario, A.C. Yeh, D. Shin, S. Wells, T. Lev-Ari, B. Williams, B. Haider, “Optimizing intact skull intrinsic signal imaging for subsequent targeted electrophysiology across mouse visual cortex.” (Scientific Reports, Feb. 2022)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05932-2
LINKS
https://bme.gatech.edu/bme/news/haider-studying-neural-traffic-jams-autism
https://bme.gatech.edu/bme/faculty/Bilal-Haider
]]>“Our annual celebration is a welcomed tradition in the College,” shared Susan Lozier, dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “As we greet new members of faculty, recognize excellence and service in research and teaching, and affirm our special community of staff and faculty, we thank the generous alumni and friends who help make these awards possible.”
In addition to annual awards honoring faculty development and mentoring, this year’s ceremony featured new accolades for staff members, made possible by funding from the Betsy Middleton and John Sutherland Dean’s Chair endowment — as well as a trio of awards recognizing exceptional contributions from postdoctoral fellows and research scientists, established through the advocacy of the College’s Research Faculty Advisory Council.
The Cullen-Peck Fellowship Awards, established by Frank Cullen (‘73 Math, MS ‘76 ISyE, PhD ‘84 ISyE) and Elizabeth (Libby) Peck (‘75 Math, MS ‘76 ISyE), to recognize mid-career faculty pursuing highly innovative research:
Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev, associate professor, Psychology
Molei Tao, associate professor, Mathematics
Pamela Peralta-Yahya, associate professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Gretzinger Moving Forward Award, endowed by Ralph Gretzinger (‘70 Math) and named to honor his late wife Jewel, recognizing the leadership of school chairs and senior faculty members who have played a pivotal role in diversifying faculty composition, creating a family friendly work environment, and providing a supportive culture for junior faculty:
Greg Huey, chair and school professor, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
The Eric R. Immel Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, endowed by Charles Crawford (‘71 Math) to recognize exemplary teaching in lower-division foundational courses by faculty in the early stages of their career — and to honor a late faculty member in the School of Mathematics, professor Eric R. Immel, who greatly influenced Crawford’s undergraduate experience at Tech:
Alonzo Whyte, academic professional in Biological Sciences, academic advisor for the Health and Medical Sciences (HMED) Minor, and director of academic advising for the Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience
Peter Yunker, assistant professor, Physics
The Leddy Family Dean’s Faculty Excellence Award, established by Jeff Leddy (’78 Physics) and Pam Leddy to support a faculty member at the associate professor level with proven accomplishments in research and teaching:
William (Will) Ratcliff, associate professor in Biological Sciences and director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program
The Faculty Mentor Award, established jointly by the College of Sciences and the Georgia Tech ADVANCE Program and presented to exemplary senior faculty who help new faculty advance in their careers as they learn to balance their roles as researchers, teachers, and advisors to their own graduate students and postdoctoral researchers:
Sung Ha Kang, professor, Mathematics
Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, professor and associate chair, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Loren Williams, professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Outstanding Junior Research Faculty Award and Outstanding Senior Research Faculty Award recognize postdoctoral and non-tenure track research faculty who have made exceptional research contributions with significant impact on their field of study:
Outstanding Junior Research Faculty Award
Gina R. Lewin, postdoctoral fellow in Marvin Whiteley’s research group, Biological Sciences
Outstanding Senior Research Faculty Award
Anton S. Petrov, research scientist II and co-investigator of the Center for the Origins of Life in Loren Williams’ research group, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Research Faculty Community Trailblazer Award recognizes postdoctoral and non-tenure track research faculty who have demonstrated exceptional and sustained leadership that strengthens and improves the research faculty community:
Micah J. Schaible, research scientist II in Thomas (Thom) Orlando’s research group, Electron and Photon Induced Chemistry on Surfaces (EPICS) Lab, Chemistry and Biochemistry
The newly established Exceptional Staff Member Award and Staff Excellence Awards recognize staff who exemplify outstanding performance above and beyond the call of duty — positively impacting the strategic goals of their department and the College, consistently providing excellent service within their school or the overall College, and demonstrating exemplary teamwork:
Exceptional Staff Member Award
Jasmine Martin, assistant to the chair, Biological Sciences
Staff Excellence Awards
Katrine Pate, grants administrator, Physics
Lea Marzo, assistant to the chair, Mathematics
Stacey Bass, grants administrator lead, Psychology and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Steven Daniele, IT support engineer senior, Academic & Research Computing Services (ARCS)
The inaugural Leadership in Action Staff Award and Excellence in Leadership Staff Awards recognize staff who have made exceptional contributions to the College through innovative and strategic leadership, change management, business process improvement, special project leadership, and similar accomplishments:
Leadership in Action Staff Award
Kimberly Stanley, assistant director of business operations, Mathematics
Excellence in Leadership Staff Awards
Kathy Sims-McDaniels, development assistant in the Dean’s Office and chair of College of Sciences Staff Advisory Council
John Wallom, associate director of IT Operations, ARCS
The College also recognized and welcomed a trio of new faculty members who arrived on campus this school year:
Onur Birol, academic professional, Biological Sciences
Tansu Celikel, professor and school chair, Psychology
Shelby Ellis, lecturer, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
The 2022 Spring Sciences Celebration program can be found here, and high-resolution photos can be downloaded here.
]]>The Applied Physiology Ph.D. program, part of the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences, focuses primarily on the physical and neural function of the human motor system. “Because of that,” explains T. Richard Nichols, Biological Sciences professor and head of Applied Physiology, “rehabilitation has always been a very strong theme in our program.”
That deeper focus on rehabilitation sciences is now formalized by the creation of the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program. The new initiative is the result of a $1 million gift from Dana and Jack McCallum (BIO ’66) that will be used over the next four years to support graduate student and faculty research, as well as train new scientists in neurorehabilitation.
Emory University School of Medicine, where Jack McCallum received his M.D., will be a close partner in developing the program. A course designed to train graduate students in clinical neurorehabilitation will be taught at the school in addition to collaborating closely in research funded by the investment.
“This gift is really going to strengthen the tie between specifically Biological Sciences and the Emory University School of Medicine, which was the intention of the gift,” explains Biological Sciences professor and associate chair of faculty development Young-Hui Chang. “I think it’s going to provide one more, but very strong, avenue for collaboration between the two institutions.”
Refocusing on rehabilitation
With a clinical focus, research funded through the program will target aspects of rehabilitation for people who have neurological diseases like Parkinson disease — or trauma, such as a spinal cord or brain injury.
The investment will also drive new major research focused on understanding the neurophysiological basis for injury and recovery related to central and peripheral nervous system trauma, and on the preclinical development of potential therapies.
“As people survive and live longer with acquired conditions such as stroke and Parkinson disease, and with traumatic injuries such as brain and spinal cord injury, there is a tremendous demand for rehabilitation researchers to meet needs of the large and growing population of persons with neurologic conditions,” explains Edelle Field-Fote, a professor with joint appointments in the Emory University School of Medicine and Applied Physiology at Georgia Tech, who also serves as director of spinal cord injury research at the Shepherd Center. “The goal of the McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program is to help address this need. The program will develop rehabilitation scientists with the training to advance knowledge underlying clinical care and the skills to develop interventions that can reduce disability, thereby improving functioning and quality of life for persons with neurologic conditions.”
Research and practice in motion
The Applied Physiology graduate program is no stranger to clinical research and development, having served as home of a clinical master’s degree in prosthetics and orthotics, which migrated to Kennesaw State University in 2020, and also hosting a training grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH), funding students whose research focused on rehabilitation for persons with limb loss. In 2018, Applied Physiology launched a dual Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Physical Therapy degree program in collaboration with the Division of Physical Therapy at Emory University, with Field-Fote as its director.
"Emory University’s Division of Physical Therapy greatly values our collaborations with Georgia Tech and its Applied Physiology program,” shares Tami Phillips, associate professor and interim program director of the Division of Physical Therapy. “The opportunity for Ph.D. students to work in research labs across institutions and D.P.T/Ph.D. students to bridge the gap between clinical neurorehabilitation practice and research will lead to innovations that will benefit individuals with neurologic conditions.”
As Nichols points out, these ties between research and the clinic build a solid foundation for the new training program. “Our faculty in Applied Physiology are used to dealing with clinical collaborators and clinical problems, but we're working more at a fundamental level in terms of the science. It really provides a nice environment for this training program and will help move us into a new area of neurorehabilitation.”
New funding for current graduate students in Applied Physiology, as well as those enrolling in the dual Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Physical Therapy program, is set to begin this year. Targeted toward advanced students, the efforts are expected to allow the Applied Physiology program to admit more new students and to award competitive McCallum Research Fellowships to help fund thesis research after they reach Ph.D. candidacy.
“I am so grateful to Dana and Jack McCallum for their foresight and generosity,” shares Field-Fote. “I am most excited by the great potential that this program has for advancing the clinical care and foundational sciences related to neurorehabilitation.”
For more information on the Applied Physiology program or the Jack and Dana McCallum Neurorehabilitation Training Program, contact Young-Hui Chang at yh.chang@ap.gatech.edu.
For more information on how to support the School of Biological Sciences or the Applied Physiology Program, contact Leslie Roberts at leslie.roberts@cos.gatech.edu and visit: cos.gatech.edu/giving
]]>Choi and Henry S. “Pete” La Pierre of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry are among 118 early career researchers across the United States and Canada named as 2022 Sloan Fellows.
"Today's Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow," says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields — and their trailblazing won't end here."
Sloan Research Fellowships are some of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early career researchers. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty — and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks. Since the first Fellowships were awarded in 1955, nearly 50 faculty from Georgia Institute of Technology have received the honor.
“I am extremely excited and honored to be named a Sloan Fellow,” Choi says. “I am deeply grateful to my research group members, mentors, colleagues and collaborators who made this possible, and I appreciate support from the School of Mathematics and the College of Sciences very much.”
Choi plans to use the grant to expand on current research projects on biological neural networks. “Specifically, with this grant, I hope to investigate computational roles of network complexities manifested by diverse neural dynamics and intricate connectivity among different types of neurons, in data-driven, functional neural networks across multiple scales, modalities, and systems. This study, therefore, will help us better understand how robust and efficient computation emerges from the unique complexity of biological neural networks, which then can be applied to innovate neuromorphic computing.”
The Choi Research Group in Mathematical Neuroscience’s primary goal “is to understand how efficient and adaptable neural coding emerges from complex connectivity structure and rich neural dynamics in both biological and artificial neural networks at multiple scales.”
Several current and former College of Sciences researchers — along with a number of College of Engineering faculty — are also recent recipients of Sloan Fellowships:
Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communiations
College of Sciences
Your brain is processing new sensations from the outside world — how the instrument feels, sounds, looks — and making decisions, based on those sensory signals, on what your muscles should do next. But practice makes perfect, right? As you gain experience, you hear the subtleties of the music and feel the strings with less effort; your fingers start moving around the fretboard with ease and seemingly without conscious thought.
“We get better at something, more experienced, and it becomes more like a reflex rather than something we think about,” said neuroengineer Garrett Stanley, who does play music but is more interested in the neuronal processes underlying this adaptive behavior, whether that means effortlessly playing a guitar, or getting dressed, or avoiding danger, or any useful behavior learned from experience.
“Adaptive behavior in a constantly changing sensory environment is not only useful when you’re learning a new hobby,” added Stanley, professor and McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “It’s crucial to survival.”
With that in mind, Stanley’s lab closely studied the neural signaling that correlates with adaptive behavior in mice, and what they found could be the first step toward new strategies to improve and speed up learning. The research, published Jan. 27 in Nature Communications, suggests that an area of the brain traditionally thought to be a basic sensory signaling center – the primary somatosensory cortex – plays a deeper role in decision making, and is part of an adaptive framework in the brain that facilitates flexible behavior as individuals gain experience.
Christian Waiblinger, postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, described the primary somatosensory cortex, or S1, as an “earlier” region of the brain, where tactile stimulus from the outside world arrives. “S1 is specifically thought to pre-process stimuli in a basic way,” Waiblinger said. “It hasn’t traditionally been associated with more complex neural processes that relate to long-term adaptive strategies.”
But scientists have long speculated that this earlier region might play a key role in higher-level functions, and that it is part of a larger framework spanning different brain structures. It’s an idea that remained mostly conceptual and theoretical, with little experimental evidence to back it up. The Stanley lab now has some evidence.
To measure brain activity in highly trained mice that are learning tasks in response to changing stimuli, the team used genetically encoded voltage imaging in vivo. That allows researchers to non-invasively record brain signals, tracking voltage-sensitive fluorescent proteins in the brain.
The researchers designed a series of psychophysical experiments to evaluate the mice, looking at how the animals operated in a changing environment — responding to whisker stimuli, being rewarded, adapting to shifting stimuli. And they measured the animals’ associated underlying neuronal signals.
“What we found is, [the S1] brain area actually changes its activity over time,” Waiblinger said. “We just kept recording and training and recording, and over weeks and months, we saw an experience-dependent effect in the mice. The more experienced the animal got with the changing sensory landscape, the more this brain area changed and adapted.”
S1 was not only pre-processing tactile stimulus and producing the primary neuronal signals associated with that basic task — it also was transmitting more complex signals necessary for adaptive behavior in a dynamically changing environment.
“This area is the first part of the cortex that receives these signals, so it’s like everything is getting routed there,” Stanley said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg – further into the cortex is where the higher-level stuff is supposed to happen, the cognitive stuff requiring decision making.”
Like the primary somatosensory cortex, this study is also just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s given the team a new hypothesis, Waiblinger said: “As you become more experienced at a certain thing, those higher-level functions can occur a bit earlier — they shift down in the hierarchy of the brain.”
Next, said Stanley, is further investigation of other brain areas. He’d like to understand the flow of information that originates outside of our bodies and moves across the hierarchy of our brains as we gain experience.
“If we can tap into this and manipulate it in some way, we might be able to enhance learning,” he said. “If we can understand this phenomenon, we might be able to influence the way that people learn and make it faster and better.”
]]>This article is part of Neuronline’s interview series “Entrepreneurial Women Combining Neuroscience, Engineering, and Tech,” which highlights the career paths and scientific accomplishments of female leaders and role models who are creatively bridging disciplines to improve lives.
What sparked your interest in mechanical engineering, and how did you decide to apply your training to neuroscience?
I’d always loved biology but did not like how it was taught, so I decided to go into a quantitative science. In the mechanical engineering program at Berkeley, I discovered I was interested in robotics and felt like we could design and control machines to understand how animals move.
I looked at labs that were using biology and engineering, and I actually worked in a neuroscience lab, looking at human movement control, but I found my love of science in a lab studying insect walking biomechanics. It occurred to me that I needed to know what the neurons tell the body to do, so I went to graduate school at Stanford to do simulations of movement from a biomechanical perspective.
Until then, I never thought I’d be a neuroscientist. It was so complicated, and I’d gone in to do computation, after all. After doing experiments, though, I decided I would like to go into neuroscience, and I did two postdocs — one in Paris in spinal cord electrophysiology, and the other a behavioral neurophysiology postdoc in Oregon.
Throughout my training, I walked around the problem of locomotion, looking at many different fields and how they contribute to our understanding of how we move. In my lab now, we integrate all those different methods.
How would you describe your work?
In all of my work, my perspective is: What is that fundamental, scientific understanding we're missing that would enable us to better understand movement disorders?
I'm most well-known for muscle synergies or motor modules, which is the idea that we can observe the habitual patterns of muscle activity used to construct movements. I think of it as a library of biomechanical actions, and when I perform a new action, it’s based on that library of actions. We all have similar ones, but mine are unique to me.
For example, we’ve shown that dancers might have slightly different habitual patterns of movement that allow them to achieve a broader repertoire of movements. When they learn to do challenging tasks, they're refining the motor modules they use in walking, so it also changes the way they walk. Instead of having to develop a whole new pattern, you're sculpting your habitual one so that it can do more.
The reason we're interested in it actually has to do with rehabilitation. My colleague Madeleine Hackney has people with Parkinson's dance an adapted tango that affects how they walk every day.
You’ve taken inspiration from electrophysiology, neurophysiology, how dancers move, and the world around you, connecting many seemingly unrelated things. How did you develop this type of creative thinking?
My way of thinking naturally tends to be more integrative and holistic — trying to look at how a principle integrates across different fields and how it might apply to patient populations. I’ve noticed other women in science think similarly.
In graduate school, however, you’re trained to follow the literature, which can be very linear.
Some of the arguments I saw in the literature seemed very one-or-the-other, and I thought, "They both make sense, and maybe they would work together." I felt I wasn’t a good scientist because I didn’t understand why these ideas were at odds with each other.
That hurt my confidence as a grad student, and I think it's the reason I felt like each field I went to wasn't quite right. I was moving from humans to animals to computation, trying to find my place. It wasn't until I got my own lab when I was able to put it all together and make it work.
How did you learn to use your way of thinking to your advantage?
It was a challenge. In the meritocracy of science, that can be seen as lacking focus.
A lot of times, linear thinking causes hyper-specialization of fields. When you start integrating ideas across areas, then you have to get yourself into fields you may not be the world expert in. That can be very uncomfortable, and it makes it easy for people not to place stock in your ideas.
So in mostly male-driven fields, if a woman comes in, she may be taken to sound like she doesn't know what she's talking about. I felt that, but I also felt the onus was on me to become confident enough in that field that I could explain myself.
How did you become more confident owning your work and sharing its impact?
It was scary at first. I didn't know if I would get a faculty position. It's a doubt a lot of people have, especially women. I needed encouragement to apply because I wasn't sure I was ready.
When my dream job opened, I knew if I didn't at least try, I would regret it. That really served as a catalyst for me to ask myself, “What am I scared of?” and, “If I could have that dream job, wasn't it worth putting myself out there?”
Then, early in my assistant professor years, my postdoctoral mentor “made” me run a workshop at a conference. I was scared, but it was an extremely important experience. I had to speak to other colleagues whom, honestly, I was intimidated by, but the panel was really well-received, and I started to feel like I could be part of this community.
Since then I’ve realized people have different ways of thinking, and it doesn't mean they're smarter than or not as smart as me. People come to the table with different experiences, training, and ideas. Finding a way to communicate them is important for science, and it’s important to me. I found my place as a translator between different areas, bridging the differences in assumptions and ways of thinking across fields.
As we work with roboticists and neurologists, I’ve continued to try to understand the lens by which different fields and people see the world and show them connections where they don't think they exist. My lab’s culture reflects that.
If we approach each other as equals, rather than from a place of thinking one field is better than another, it goes a lot farther toward having a fruitful collaboration.
What advice do you have for other women considering a similar career?
The advice I give to anyone looking to take the next step in their training is to think about what do you want to do in another field, and then challenge yourself to go beyond that and immerse yourself in that other field, so that the field that you create is in the in-between.
If you’re a nonlinear thinker, it can take much longer to find what you're looking for. I see that a lot with people who are more of a creative, scattered type like me. When I was kid I always wondered how people could know the one thing they wanted to spend all of their time doing. I felt like I had to know early on what it was that I wanted to do forever. I didn't find that until after I’d gone through undergrad, grad school, two postdocs, and a faculty position, and honestly, it keeps changing. I now know that's okay. That's my way of discovering the world.
About Lena Ting, Ph.D.
Lena Ting is codirector of the Georgia Tech and Emory Neural Engineering Centers and the John and Jan Portman Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, and a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Division of Physical Therapy at Emory University. She is director of the Neuromechanics Lab, which draws from neuroscience, biomechanics, rehabilitation, robotics, and physiology to study how movement intention translates to action. Focusing on complex, whole body human movements such as bipedal walking and standing balance, which have strong clinical relevance, as well as skilled movements seen in dancers and athletes, she uses computational and experimental methods to understand both normal and impaired movement control. She has discovered principles of human movement and, in collaboration with physical therapy researchers, is developing novel interventions for Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and spinal cord injury.
This article was originally published on NEURONLINE, March 9, 2020, by the Society for Neuroscience.
]]>At least, that’s how it works in a healthy brain. For people with a range of disparate ailments – autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit disorders, or schizophrenia, for example – finding the friend in the yellow hat isn’t all that simple. And so, understanding the role of attention in sensory perception is a critical component of neuro research, and ultimately, in the future development of better diagnostic tests or treatments, and also for the enhancement of normal attention.
With all of that in mind, Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Bilal Haider and his team are meticulously investigating the brain circuits and mechanisms underlying visual spatial attention, utilizing transgenic mice, publishing their most recent findings in the online journal, Nature Communications, with an article entitled, “Spatial attention enhances network, cellular and subthreshold responses in mouse visual cortex.”
“We figured out how to control and measure visual attention in the mouse brain,” said Haider, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University (BME), and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
“We then found that attention to a point in space quickly causes widespread enhancement of neural responses to both faint and bright visual stimuli at that location – just like increasing the volume amplifies all the details in the music, not just the vocals,” explained Haider.
The latest work builds on his lab’s previous research, which showed that mice are an excellent model system for studying how neural circuits mediate visual behavior, providing a useful platform for studying what happens when humans make fast decisions – or when they don’t – about visual information.
“This paper sets us up to identify the neural circuits underlying these attentional effects using genetic technologies easily exploitable in mice, and also to investigate attention deficits in mouse models of neurological disease,” said Haider, whose collaborators/co-writers were lead author Anderson Speed (BME graduate student), Joseph Del Rosario (BME grad student), and Navid Mikail (former BME undergraduate researcher in Haider’s lab).
The research was funded by the Whitehall Foundation, Sloan Foundation, GT Neural Engineering Center, NIH NINDS (1R01NS107968), and NIH BRAIN Initiative (1R01NS109978).
]]>Investigators and students from Georgia Tech, Emory University, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Rice University, and Florida International University came together to explore research in areas such as computational engineering, computational neuroscience, and the clinical use of emerging neurotechnologies.
“With this great community of faculty and students, we have unique opportunities to do cutting-edge research using sophisticated computational methods to understand neural activity and their relationship to behaviors in health and disease,” said Lena Ting, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tech and Emory, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
“We need new theories and technologies to understand brain as a dynamic and adaptive system that changes moment-by-moment, and in individual specific ways,” said Ting, who co-directed the event with fellow Coulter Department/Petit Institute investigators, Chris Rozell and Garrett Stanley. “Ultimately such research can lead to smart neural technologies that adapt and change with us and which could treat neurological and psychiatric disorders.”
The workshop evolved over two days (Nov. 6-7), starting at the Petit Institute, and concluding at the new Kendeda Building, the most sustainable building in the Southeast, one designed to generate more on-site electricity than it uses. An event like I2B injected its own kind of energy, covering a range of issues, including a few that aren’t typically part of neurotech development, including neuroethics (the impact of technologies on the human experience), “and the challenges of getting the technologies into humans in the first place,” Ting said. “We wanted to have public discussion that could seed these ideas in the next generation of students who will be advancing these technologies so they could think about these challenges at the beginning of their research careers.”
As a field, neuro research is exploding, according to Stanley, making interfaces between technology and the brain and nervous system inevitable – and making the resulting technical, educational, and ethical challenges also inevitable.
“As neurotechnology starts to move from the lab to the clinic and industry, there are a lot of issues for our community to tackle,” Stanley said. “And I think we brought in a good team of people from different areas within neuro research to talk about these high-level issues, people who can help us move forward.”
The research enterprise is on the cusp of understanding the brain well enough now to consider what could be a robust commercial venture around neurotechnologies, including investigators engaged in basic research. “We’re certainly motivated by the idea that basic discoveries can have an impact on people down the road,” said Rozell, who is also a professor in Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. And we’ve got some powerful things to think about as we shape the future of the field.”
As the leadership team looks ahead to the next I2B workshop (there will be another, Stanley said), they remain committed to an inclusive, collaborative approach within the current six-university consortium, and beyond.
“Neural engineering has to be a highly collaborative endeavor to be successful, reflecting the many perspectives and values of society,” said Ting, reflecting on her takeaways from the November workshop.
The effort she envisions would include not only the usual participants – research engineers, scientists, and clinicians – but also government, industry, patients, ethicists, the general public, “even artists,” Ting said. “That’s a tall order, but we are hoping to influence how we educate students and go about our research and be more inclusive of diverse perspectives and approaches.”
]]>The noninvasive treatment, which induces brain waves known as gamma oscillations, also greatly reduced the number of amyloid plaques found in the brains of these mice – in Alzheimer patients, abnormal levels of amyloid (a naturally occurring protein) form plaques that gather between neurons and disrupt cell function.
The researchers published their work, entitled “Multi-sensory Gamma Stimulation Ameliorates Alzheimer’s-Associated Pathology and Improves Cognition,” earlier this spring in the journal Cell.
“This research builds on our prior work by introducing multi-modal stimulation – light and sound pulses together, as opposed to light alone – which is able to affect neural activity in the memory centers of the brain,” said Abigail Paulson, co-lead author of the paper, and a graduate student in the lab of Annabelle Singer, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, and assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tech and Emory University.
“This is really interesting to us as these brain regions are some of the first to be affected in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease,” added Paulson.
The other lead author was Anthony Martorell, a graduate student in the lab of Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the senior author of the study. Singer, a co-author of the study who is developing a non-invasive means to drive precision neural activity while drafting the brain’s immune system to treat disease, was awarded an R01 grant ($2 million over five years) from the NIH last year to support further efforts in this arena.
“Traditionally, stimulation methods have been invasive or they usually don’t reach deep brain structures,” Singer said. “There’s been some work in this area, but there aren’t many options – for one thing, they’re not very fast, they don’t have millisecond precision.”
This latest research with her former colleagues at MIT (where Singer was a postdoctoral researcher) proves, in mice, that the noninvasive treatment works not only in the visual cortex (as an earlier study demonstrated), “but also in hippocampus, in the brain’s memory centers,” said Singer, who believes the novel approach will spur new therapeutic approaches to Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, “and galvanize new basic science research with wide-ranging impact.”
In the future, Paulson said, “we are planning to investigate how this sensory stimulation affects neural activity during behavior and memory processes.”
Further study will be needed to determine if the treatment will work in human patients. Along those lines, Singer’s lab is collaborating with Emory physician researchers Jim Lah (who directs Emory’s Cognitive Neurology Program) and Allan Levey (director of the Emory Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center).
]]>But, they see well enough to quickly detect visual stimuli throughout their visual fields. Bilal Haider says this makes mice an excellent model system, “for studying how neural circuits mediate rapid visual behaviors – mice are a very good model for studying what can happen in humans making fast decisions about visual information.”
Haider, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and his colleagues prove the value of mice while demonstrating how the brain visually detects and perceives visual stimuli in their latest research, entitled “Cortical State Fluctuations across Layers of V1 during Visual Spatial Perception,” published recently in the journal Cell Reports.
“This paper shows that mice can detect a small, faint object appearing very briefly and unpredictably in the visual field, and they can respond to this stimuli in less than half a second, and make a precise motor response,” explains Haider, corresponding author of the paper, whose co-researchers on the project were lead authors Anderson Speed and co-author Joseph Del Rosario, grad students in his lab, and Christopher P. Burgess, a researcher at Google DeepMind in the UK.
“Actually, mice have a very fast visual system to produce actions, not that much slower than ours,” Haider adds.
In the paper, the authors explain that behavioral factors like sleep, wakefulness, and movement have strong effects on the state of cortical activity. And while Haider and others have previous established that cortical states have profound effects on sensory responses, there remain unresolved questions about cortical states and their effects on the speed and accuracy of sensory perception.
So, to address the questions they trained mice to detect visual stimuli appearing in discrete portions of the visual field. And they simultaneously measured local field potentials (an electrophysiological signal generated by the electric current flowing from large populations of neurons) and excitatory and inhibitory neuron populations across layers of the primary visual cortex that receives visual information.
Through their experiments, Haider’s team showed that changes in cortical activity states exert strong, widespread effects in a mouse’s primary visual cortex, and can play a prominent role for visual spatial behavior. Haider’s team could use this neural activity to “mind read” and accurately predict perceptual outcomes.
Basically, the team figured out, Haider says, “that the properties of the visual system in mice, especially the way they use vision for behavior, and the neural activity that we see in their visual system, is remarkably similar to what’s seen in primates and humans. This will allow us to use the mouse as a platform for studying neural circuits underlying visual dysfunctions in models of neurological diseases.”
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The grant, entitled “A novel brain-machine interface for rehabilitation,” aims to develop new strategies to help restore movement to people who are paralyzed, including those affected by spinal cord injury and stroke. Brain-machine interface systems interface directly with the brain to allow people with paralysis to control external assistive devices, such as robotic arms or exoskeletons, or to control the movement of their own limbs through direct electrical stimulation of muscles.
In previous work at Stanford, Pandarinath and colleagues developed brain-machine interfaces that focused on a particular portion of the brain known as the motor cortex. In the current study, Pandarinath, in collaboration with colleagues in the departments of Neurosurgery and Neurology at Emory, hopes to test whether multiple areas of the brain, which each control different aspects of movement, might provide complementary signals for controlling brain-machine interfaces.
The mission of the Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Career Development program is to recruit and train scholars with engineering and other quantitative backgrounds to become successful rehabilitation scientists in basic, translational, and/or clinical research. These rehabilitation scientists will have the ability to integrate knowledge from the various disciplines involved in Movement and Rehabilitation Science (MRS) research, including engineering, quantitative neuroscience and physiology, and affiliated clinical sciences.
The program is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number K12HD073945.
]]>The process, which has been particularly useful in neuroscience, involves bringing a pipette filled with electrolyte solution and a recording electrode connected to an amplifier, into contact with the membrane of a single cell. So basically, researchers can eavesdrop on the furtive chattering of neurons in the ongoing effort to unlock the brain’s secrets.
“Thousands of people practice this technique every day around the world,” says Craig Forest, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “But it is painfully tedious and time consuming.”
So Forest and his colleagues decided to speed things up a bit. And now, their automated patch clamping robot – the ‘patcherBot’ – is being commercialized and will be made available to researchers worldwide with the signed licensing agreement between Georgia Tech Research Corporation (GTRC) and Sensapex, an electrophysiology device company based in Finland.
“This is exciting, because this technology is going from the lab, from some research journal articles, into the real world,” says Forest, associate professor in Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and in the Coulter Department for Biomedical Engineering at Tech and Emory University.
“Our mission is to develop tools that make new science possible,” he adds.
Forest’s lab has been working on iterations of the patcherBot for at least six years, developing an image guidance version to target cells and automation technology to create a tight seal between the glass pipette (one micron in diameter) and the cell membrane, which provides a direct electrical connection to the inside of the cell.
In 2016 the research team overturned decades of dogma in the field, developing a robotic technique for reusing the pipettes – for years, went the assumption, these tiny glass tubes could only be used once and were then thrown away. Ilya Kolb, a former graduate student in Forest’s lab, questioned this and set out to find a cleaning method, now patent pending, that could adequately sterilize the pipettes.
“Traditionally, a researcher could do five to 10 recordings a day, and that’s if they’re really good,” Forest says. “Our idea was to clean the pipette automatically after each recording, so we could tell the robot to go back to cells over and over. You don’t even have to be in the room, just set it up and leave, and when you come back to the lab, you’ve recorded about 100 cells.”
Now, a researcher in a biology lab doesn’t have to be an expert in pipette pulling or patch clamping, says Forest, who has talked about the technology “democratizing this area of research,” and sees the potential of patch clamping becoming as commonplace as PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a common biology technique to make many copies of DNA.
Sensapex already has a customer – the first patcherBot will be delivered in April 2019 to Janelia Research Campus, one of the world’s leading neuroscience research centers, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And Forest’s former grad student, Kolb, is now a researcher at Janelia, which has been on a 10-year optogenetic mission to develop fluorescent molecules – optogenetics uses light to control neurons that have been genetically modified to express light-sensitive ion channels.
At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in October, where 30,000 neuro-researchers will gather in Chicago, Sensapex will have the patcherBot on display.
]]>“It’s a well-studied cognitive phenomenon – we anticipate a certain color or a certain feature in a particular region of the visual scene,” says Bilal Haider, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech. “Attention allows your brain to focus and extract information from the scene very quickly.”
Haider and his team are investigating, at a very detailed level, the circuits and mechanisms involved in visual spatial attention, and they recently received a BRAIN Award through the NIH to support their research.
President Barack Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) in 2013, an international public-private research collaborative supporting the development and application of innovative technologies in an effort to produce a new dynamic picture of the brain that will show how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in time and space.
The goal is to fill the gaps in our current knowledge and provide opportunities to investigate how the brain allows the human body to record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve massive amounts of information at the speed of thought. And Haider’s $2.1 million, five-year award, administered through the NIH NINDS, is the latest BRAIN Award granted to Georgia Tech researchers every year since the program’s launch.
Haider’s project is entitled, “Circuit and synaptic mechanisms of visual spatial attention.” Haider and his team, “are basically going to investigate in a very detailed way the circuits and mechanisms involved in visual spatial attention,” he says.
The role of attention in sensory perception is an important question in neuroscience, especially when trying to understand and create better treatments for disorders like schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and attention deficit disorders. Haider and his team will utilize transgenic mice and combine high-density local field potential and neural activity recordings in the visual cortex, patch-clamp recordings from cortical and thalamic synaptic connections, cell-type specific optogenetics, and a well-characterized spatial attention task to elucidate the neural mechanisms of attention at multiple levels: specific cells, synapses, and circuits.
Haider’s BRAIN Award, which launched officially in the fall, will run for five years, through July 2023, and is valued at $2.1 million.
“We want to understand how circuits rapidly move attention this way or that way, turn it on and turn it off,” says Haider. “Once we can get a handle on that, we can really start to understand how we might be able to enhance normal attention and remedy attention deficits.”
This is just the latest NIH BRAIN Award for BME researchers. Haider’s department colleagues Garrett Stanley and Lena Ting are currently engaged in active BRAIN Initiative projects. Stanley’s third BRAIN Initiative project, entitled “Thalamocortical state control of tactile sensing: Mechanisms, Models, and Behavior,” was launched in January 2018 and runs through 2022. Ting’s project, “CRCNS: Multi-scale models of proprioceptive encoding for sensorimotor control,” began in 2016 and runs through May 2021.
]]>The fellowships, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955, honor early-career scholars who, “represent the very best science has to offer,” says Sloan President Adam Falk. “The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems, and succeeding brilliantly—Fellows are quite literally the future of twenty-first century science.”
Agarwal, assistant professor in the School of Chemistry, is interested in studying small organic molecules called ‘natural products,’ from which a majority of antibiotics and other drugs are derived. As biochemists, his research team asks some simple questions: how and why are natural products made in nature, what can be learned from their biosynthetic processes, and how nature’s synthetic capabilities be exploited for interesting applications?
Haider, is assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. His research goal is to identify cellular and circuit mechanisms that modulate neural responsiveness in the cerebral cortex, using a variety of advanced electrical and optical techniques to record, stimulate, and the interpret the activity of specific neuronal sub-types.
But the two-year, $65,000 Sloan award doesn’t support a specific research project effort, according to Haider says. It supports the individual.
“It’s very exciting because it’s different from a traditional kind of grant. This is more about the research direction you have envisioned as a young investigator,” he says. “This is about funding the person. It’s a real vote of confidence.”
Sloan also recognized a third Georgia Tech researcher, Lutz Warnke, assistant professor in the School of Mathematics. A full list of the 2018 Fellows is available at the Sloan Foundation website.
Available to tenure track faculty in eight scientific fields, the Fellowships are awarded at a key moment in a researcher’s career. Past Sloan Research Fellows include towering figures in the history of science, including physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, and game theorist John Nash. Forty-five fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science, and 17 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.
Drawn this year from 53 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, the 2018 Sloan Research Fellows represent a diverse array of institutions and backgrounds. This year’s Fellows include:
Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics—the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists and winning fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars in their field on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become a leader in his or her field.
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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics.
]]>Kim, who is an assistant professor in both the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, will use the two-year, $424,000 grant to leverage his team’s research, which is focused on mitigating Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our study outcomes will serve as a foundation for translating the basic research and technology to the clinics, accelerating advanced central nervous system delivery of therapeutic and diagnostic agents,” says Kim, who is collaborating with Srikant Rangaraju, a physician-scientist who is an assistant professor in the Emory School of Medicine’s Department of neurology.
Rangaraju, a board-certified neurologist, is a trainee of Alan Levey, director of Emory’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, who will serve as consultant and advisor on the grant.
Currently, the disease-modifying effects of therapeutics on Alzheimer’s disease is hindered by poor central nervous system penetration across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). But Kim and his fellow researchers believe they can overcome that obstacle with a better system of delivering precious therapeutic payloads.
“The goal is to leverage our engineered nano-carrier, enabling sufficient penetration of a small molecule inhibiting microglial Kv1.3, thus attenuating neuro-inflammation for Alzheimer’s disease treatment,” Kim says.
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So, in 2013 President Barack Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), an international public-private research collaborative that proactively supports researchers who are accelerating the development and application of innovative technologies – researchers like Garrett Stanley at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Stanley, who is the Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, recently won his third BRAIN award in three years from the NIH (National Institutes of Health).
“This puts us in a good place nationally and internationally,” says Stanley, a neuroengineer in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “On a very practical level, these awards are being given to scientists in the top neuroscience programs at top universities in the country, so it says a lot about what’s happening here to Georgia and Emory.”
The grant, which builds upon the work of previous BRAIN grants, invests $1.9 million over five years for a project called “Thalmocortical state control of tactile sensing: Mechanisms, Models, and Behavior”. Stanley is the principal investigator on the project, along with the co-investigator Bilal Haider, an assistant professor in the Coulter Department.
In 2014, Stanley and fellow Petit Institute researcher Craig Forest, associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, won a BRAIN Award from NIH for a project entitled, “In-vivo circuit activity measurement at single cell, sub-threshold resolution.” In 2015, Stanley and Emory neuroscientist Dieter Jaeger won a BRAIN grant for a project called, “Multiscale Analysis of Sensory-Motor Cortical Gating in Behaving Mice.”
Early projects in the sprawling BRAIN Initiative were focused heavily on the development of new technology, but the mission is shifting a little, according to Stanley.
“The first phase was all about developing the tools,” Stanley says. “Now we’re focused more on doing science with those tools, which are enabling us to target different areas of the brain like we’ve never done before.”
In the project with Forest’s lab, the idea was to use an in vivo robotic patch clamping system (developed by Forest with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to measure changes in electrical activity from individual neurons, with the goal of recording intracellular neural communication, to better understand how long-distance neural connections change when our brains go into different states, such as sleeping and waking.
In the project with Jaeger, the aim was to use genetically expressed voltage sensors to optically image brain activity during sensory-motor tasks – to capture the flow of information as the human brain senses and perceives the outside world, and to better understand that information.
This time, Stanley’s team plans to use an array of electrophysiological tools to determine the role of the thalamus in dynamically gating information flow to the rest of the brain during changes in states of arousal. And they’re targeting the thalamus, which is basically the central relay station for incoming and outgoing messages between the brain to the body.
“It controls what information makes it into the brain, what you can feel and perceive,” says Stanley. “There are things we often take for granted, like sitting there and falling asleep. What does that mean when your brain disconnects from the rest of the world, or reconnects.”
The funding mechanism being utilized for Stanley’s BRAIN project comes through the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) specifically targets brain circuitry, which fits neatly within Georgia Tech’s wheelhouse.
“The brain is made up of circuits, and who better to work on circuits than a bunch of engineers,” says Stanley. “Most disorders in the brain are not just the mutation of a gene, and they’re not always associated with cell death. They’re diseases of the circuits.”
It turns out that circuit dysfunction is common to most neurological and psychiatric disorders, so understanding how the circuitry works is a key step on the way to developing a new age of therapeutics.
“We’re getting better at pulling the switches and levers of the brain,” Stanley says. “I think that what we’re going to find is, the ability to probe and manipulate in specific ways at the circuit level is one of the keys to treating neurological disorders that currently have no cure.”
]]>Fellows, who are considered among the most innovative early-career scientists in the nation, will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research.
“The expectation with this fellowship is that you will tackle big problems,” said Singer, also a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “This gives us the freedom to pursue some outside-the-box projects that could be really impactful. Unlike most grants, there are very few funding restrictions, meaning we can go wherever the science takes us.”
The Packard Fellowships are among the nation’s largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed to allow maximum flexibility in how the funding is used. Packard Fellows have gone on to achieve significant accomplishments, receiving additional awards and honors that include the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Fields Medal, the Alan T. Waterman Award, MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to the National Academies. Their work has led to impressive research outcomes, including the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, sequencing the Ebola virus genome, the creation of Bose-Einstein condensates, and pioneering research on glaciology and abrupt climate change.
“These scientists and engineers are tackling unanswered questions and pushing the boundaries of their fields,” said Frances Arnold, Chair of the Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel and former Packard Fellow, of this year’s class. “Their innovations could lead to breakthroughs in how we live our lives and our understanding of nature. Is there another planet in our solar system? Can we find a way to predict earthquakes? Can learning more about how we make memories help us preserve them? If past fellowships are any indication, the possibilities are boundless.”
Singer sees the fellowship as validation for her research, which employs novel techniques to identify and restore failures in brain activity that lead to memory impairment.
“Ultimately our goal is to understand how neural activity both produces memories and protects brain health and then use this knowledge to engineer neural activity to repair brain function,” she said. “Using non-invasive approaches, we’re working to develop new ways to treat diseases that affect memory, like Alzheimer’s, for which there are no effective therapies.”
Since 1988, the foundation has awarded $394 million to support 577 scientists and engineers from 54 universities. The fellowships program was inspired by David Packard’s commitment to strengthen university-based science and engineering programs in the United States, recognizing that the success of the Hewlett-Packard Company, which he cofounded, was derived in large measure from research and development in university laboratories.
This year, the foundation increased its overall grant budget in response to new challenges to promote stronger national support for science and greater reliance on evidence-based decision-making. The Packard Foundation’s work is grounded in science and research to ensure its investments have lasting impact.
“David Packard was passionate about investing in our country’s scientists and engineers because he believed philanthropy could play a unique role in sparking discovery,” said Lynn Orr, Packard Fellows Advisory Panel member and former Foundation Trustee. “Unrestricted, flexible funding, coupled with support from universities, the public sector, industry, and nonprofit organizations provides scientists and engineers creative space to unearth new knowledge.”
Each year, the foundation invites 50 universities to nominate two faculty members for consideration. The Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel, a group of 12 internationally-recognized scientists and engineers, evaluates the nominations and recommends fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.
“It’s great to know that some really smart people think our research plans are worth supporting,” said Singer. “Current and former Packard Fellows are a very impressive group so it’s an honor to be among them.”
Faculty members across the Georgia Tech campus read Singer’s application and, she said, gave excellent feedback. Particularly helpful was the advice she received from Petit Institute researchers Greg Gibson (professor in the School of Biological Sciences) and Will Ratcliff (assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences), both former Packard Fellows.
Singer believes the fellowship is a reflection on the work being done at Emory and Georgia Tech.
“We’re in the midst of a big plan to expand neuroscience, and I hope this will help get the word out that it's a great place to do cutting edge neuroscience and neuroengineering,” she said.
Packard Fellows must be faculty members who are eligible to serve as principal investigators on research in the natural and physical sciences or engineering, and must be within the first three years of their faculty careers. Disciplines that are considered include physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, astronomy, computer science, earth science, ocean science, and all branches of engineering.
Meet the recipients of the 2017 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering:
Jonathan C. Barnes
Department of Chemistry, Washington University, St. Louis
Discipline: Chemistry
The human musculature consists of tightly bundled fibers that are capable of changing their size, shape, and mechanical properties. Barnes’ lab explores the design and synthesis of functional polymer-based materials, for the development of non-toxic combination drug delivery systems, stimuli-responsive materials, new polymer architectures, and templates for biomacromolecules. They hope to find macromolecular solutions to major challenges in chemistry, medicine, and materials science.
Konstantin Batygin
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology
Discipline: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology
The most distant bodies within an expansive field of icy debris beyond Neptune’s orbit have a peculiar orbital alignment, and collectively point to the existence of an additional, Neptune-like planet in the solar system. Batygin plans to conduct an extensive suite of theoretical and numerical calculations that will identify the distant planet’s location, and discover it observationally, seeking to unravel the dramatic narrative of the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
Michael Birnbaum
Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Discipline: Biological Sciences
Birnbaum’s research group combines mechanistic immunology, protein engineering, and computational methods to better understand and manipulate immune recognition and signaling. By identifying the determinants of successful immunity, his research group works to create safer, more effective treatments for infectious diseases, autoimmunity, and cancer.
Ilana Brito
School of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University
Discipline: Biological Sciences
Bacteria can rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions by incorporating novel DNA into their genomes. This process of gene transfer underlies the spread of antibiotic resistance among the world’s most notorious pathogens. Brito’s lab is developing new tools to better predict the spread of genes in natural microbial communities.
Marine A. Denolle
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Discipline: Geosciences
Major urban areas are often developed on soft soils and subject to strong seismic amplification during earthquakes. Exploiting underground natural resources alters the structure and may affect our understanding of seismic hazard. Denolle’s research characterizes the evolution of seismic hazard due to earthquake ground motions and natural resource exploitation, and seeks to predict the evolution of seismic hazard in urban areas.
Elaine Hsiao
Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles
Discipline: Biological Sciences
Inspired by the amazing and complex interactions between organ systems, the Hsiao lab is studying how changes in the microbiome and immunity impact brain function and behavior. They aim to uncover mechanisms for communication between gut bacteria, immune cells, and neurons, toward understanding how these signaling pathways impact neurological disease.
Pinshane Huang
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Discipline: Materials Science, Nanotechnology
Huang’s research develops techniques that use electron microscopes to characterize matter with single atom precision, with the ultimate goal of enabling an era in which materials can be designed and perfected at the level of individual atoms.
Christoph M. Keplinger
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discipline: Engineering – Civil or Mechanical
The Keplinger Research Group aims to synergize concepts from soft matter physics and polymer chemistry with advanced engineering technologies in order to solve problems that impede human progress. Their current research is focused on the development of high-performance, self-healing artificial muscles, as well as on generating sustainable energy from untapped sources of renewable energy, such as ocean waves.
Alexie S. Leauthaud-Harnett
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discipline: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology
Understanding the nature of dark energy and dark matter, which together make up 95% of the mass-energy density of the current-day universe, are two of the most fundamental questions in modern physics. Leauthaud-Harnett’s group specializes in the design, analysis, and theoretical interpretation of maps of the sky containing millions of galaxies, in order to characterize dark energy and understand how galaxies and dark matter structures grow with time.
Nir M. Navon
Department of Physics, Yale University
Discipline: Physics
Turbulence is among the most mysterious phenomena in nature, with extensive ramifications in biology, mathematics, and physics. Using a novel experimental approach, Navon’s research group synthesizes highly-controllable quantum matter to explore complex many-body phenomena in extremely pure conditions: from the production of new quantum phases of matter, to the study of turbulence in dilute quantum fluids.
Hosea M. Nelson
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles
Discipline: Chemistry
Nelson’s lab is focused on discovering new chemical reactions that will enable the efficient and environmentally-benign syntheses of fuels, materials, and medicines. They take an interdisciplinary approach, exploring novel concepts in chemical catalysis that lie at the interface of organic synthesis, inorganic chemistry, and molecular biology.
Magdalena R. Osburn
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University
Discipline: Geosciences
Microbes are the catalysts and engines that drive major element cycles on Earth, yet the vast majority of microbes are known only as DNA sequences. The Osburn Lab seeks to cultivate environmental microbes from deep underground to better understand both the microbes and their role in shaping the Earth.
John V. Pardon
Department of Mathematics, Princeton University
Discipline: Mathematics
Pardon’s research explores problems in geometry and topology (the study of shapes up to continuous deformation) and related fields. Although topological problems are insensitive to the geometry of objects in question, geometric structures often play an unexpected role in the answer to topological questions.
Mikael C. Rechtsman
Department of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
Discipline: Physics
Rechtsman’s lab studies the physics of light propagating through complex structures, combining experiments and theory to study the interplay between structure and function. They seek to demonstrate new fundamental physics, as well as device designs that have potential application in medical imaging, high-power lasers, and solar energy.
Amir Safavi-Naeini
Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University
Discipline: Physics
Current electronic circuits are ill-suited for the emergence of quantum information. Safavi-Naeini’s group develops chips that process photons (light and microwaves) and phonons (mechanical motion) in the quantum regime, enabling fundamentally new functionality. His research seeks to form the basis of future quantum networks, sensors, and distributed quantum computers.
Annabelle C. Singer
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Discipline: Neuroscience
Singer’s research uses novel techniques to identify and restore failures in brain activity that lead to memory impairment. Using non-invasive approaches, she is translating her discoveries from rodents to develop radically new ways to treat diseases that affect memory in humans, like Alzheimer’s.
Michael Yartsev
Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley
Discipline: Neuroscience
What is it about the human mammalian brain that allows us to learn our language? The Yartsev lab studies the neural basis of complex spatial and acoustic behaviors, and uses cutting-edge technologies to examine one of the only known vocal learning mammals: the bat. Yartsev’s lab hopes to uncover the mysterious neurobiological underpinning of language learning in the mammalian brain.
Laurence Yeung
Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Rice University
Discipline: Geosciences
What can the atmosphere tell us about the state of a planet? Using the Earth as a test case, Yeung is developing a toolkit for uncovering how a planet’s atmosphere can broadcast its geological, biological, and climatic machinery through patterns in its chemical and isotopic composition.
For more detailed information on each of the Fellows, please visit the Fellowship Directory.
About the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering
For 29 years, the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering program has awarded $394 million to support 577 scientists from 54 top national universities. It is among the nation's largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed with minimal constraints on how the funding is used to give the Fellows freedom to think big and look at complex issues with a fresh perspective. Packard Fellows have gone on to receive additional awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Fields Medal, the MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Visit the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering webpage to learn more about the program and watch a video about the Fellowships.
About the David and Lucile Packard Foundation
David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private family foundation created in 1964 by David Packard (1912–1996), cofounder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and Lucile Salter Packard (1914–1987). The Foundation provides grants to nonprofit organizations in the following program areas: Conservation and Science; Population and Reproductive Health; Children, Families, and Communities; and Local Grantmaking. The Foundation makes national and international grants and also has a special focus on the Northern California counties of San Benito, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Monterey. Foundation grantmaking includes support for a wide variety of activities including direct services, research and policy development, and public information and education. Learn more at www.packard.org.
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Dyer is one of six distinguished young researchers who will provide feedback in both formal and informal settings to young scientists at the Allen Institute. The program recognizes the outstanding and innovative contributions from emerging scientific leaders and fosters professional development by providing opportunities and informal training on how to serve as scientific advisors.
“We are very pleased to welcome this group of impressive researchers as advisors to the Allen Institute,” says Christof Koch, President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “Their caliber and fresh perspectives make them invaluable to our team. We look forward to hearing their feedback as well as providing guidance as they build their own careers.”
Next Generation Leaders are selected each year through a competitive application process from a pool of international applicants. This fourth cohort of Next Generation Leaders includes members from institutions around the country, each of whom will serve a three-year term on the council.
Here’s a complete list of the newly appointed Next Generation Leaders Advisory Council members:
Dyer’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and neuroscience. She develops computational methods for discovering principles that govern the organization and structure of the brain, as well as methods for integrating multi-modal datasets to reveal the link between neural structure and function.
“As a computational neuroscientist, I see the Allen Institute for Brian Science’s open access datasets as a literal treasure trove,” says Dyer. “In my role as a Next Generation Leader, I look forward to building a strong and lasting relationship with the Allen Institute. I believe that our collaborative relationship will help facilitate the development of large-scale and open neural data analysis methods so greatly needed by the neuroscience community.”
The Next Generation Leaders council will convene at this year’s Showcase Symposium, held in Seattle Dec. 13-14, 2017. The new members will give presentations on their work and meet with Allen Institute researchers. Additional responsibilities of the Next Generation Leaders include attending a primary advisory council meeting at the Allen Institute in Seattle once per year, to provide feedback on Institute research projects that helps the Allen Institute plan and adopt the best methods for meeting its scientific goals.
About the Allen Institute for Brain Science: The Allen Institute for Brain Science is a division of the Allen Institute (alleninstitute.org), an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit medical research organization, and is dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. Using a big science approach, the Allen Institute generates useful public resources used by researchers and organizations around the globe, drives technological and analytical advances, and discovers fundamental brain properties through integration of experiments, modeling and theory. Launched in 2003 with a seed contribution from founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, the Allen Institute is supported by a diversity of government, foundation and private funds to enable its projects. The Allen Institute for Brain Science’s data and tools are publicly available online at brain-map.org.
Contact:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
Muscle spindles are skeletal muscle sensory receptors – a type of proprioceptor, which is a sensor that lets you do things like touch your finger to your nose when your eyes are closed, or play guitar without looking at the fretboard. Proprioceptors basically tell the brain where your body is and what it’s doing, and the brain analyzes the information, providing awareness of where your body is in space.
“They give rise to reflexes that help stabilize the body – this is what is tested when the doctor tests the knee-jerk response,” says Lena Ting, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Ting is very interested in muscle spindles, and the study of them fits squarely within her lab’s goal of understanding how the musculoskeletal system interacts with the nervous system to produce movement. “Specifically, we are interested in balance control and how the system degrades in conditions that make people prone to falling,” she says.
To that end, her lab has produced some cutting-edge research, published recently in Public Library of Science (PLOS) journal, Computational Biology. The work may alter long-established views of muscle spindles, how they work, and how they affect people with neurological challenges and other movement issues.
“The prevailing hypotheses about muscle spindles have been in place a long time – some of the research that has relied on these hypotheses may need to be reexamined in light of our study,” says Kyle Blum, a graduate student in Ting’s lab and lead author of the paper, “Force encoding in muscle spindles during stretch of passive muscle.”
In general, the idea established over the past 50 years or so, according to Ting, is that muscle spindles fire in response to, or encode, the length and velocity of the muscle.
“But we found that they fire in response to muscle force instead,” Ting says. “Time will tell, but I think this could ultimately be groundbreaking in how we understand movements and their disorders.”
Prior work by Ting’s group involved experimentally “pulling the rug out from under people,” which showed that the most rapid balance correcting response generated by the nervous system was related to acceleration signals originating from proprioceptive sensors in the muscles.
“This was puzzling, because this is not the standard description of proprioceptive sensory signals,” says Ting. “There had been some evidence of acceleration signals in muscle spindles, but it was not rigorously tested or broadly accepted.”
To see if human balance behavior could be explained by acceleration coding in muscle spindle sensors, Ting’s lab collaborated with investigators in Paris (where she’d been a postdoctoral researcher) who were doing advanced electrophysiological research, directly recording from sensory neurons as they fire during carefully imposed accelerations while stretching a muscle. In order to gather the right data, Ting developed customized computer programs to change the way standard muscle testing equipment generates experimental stretches.
There are two main aspects of sensory coding. The first, “is the mechanical signals being transformed into neural signals by the receptors themselves. The second is how the brain interprets these signals, giving rise to perception,” says Ting, whose team looked specifically at the first aspect.
In many cases, she notes, the muscle’s force and length are very similar. “However, we took advantage of special situations in which a muscle’s force and length diverge significantly, and our data showed the firing patterns follow force and not length or velocity,” says Ting, pointing out the implication of these findings on our understanding of perception.
“These special conditions are also analogous to conditions causing perceptual illusions or error in limb position and movement," Ting adds. "Therefore, our brains are interpreting a muscle force-dependent signal as joint position and velocity. This works well most of the time, but other times it can cause incorrect or illusory sensations.”
Imagine standing in an open doorway and moving your arms outward to press the door frame. You push as hard as you can for about a minute. Then leave the doorway, and though you may feel like your arms are at your side, they are actually floating effortlessly upward, pressing against a door frame that is no longer there.
Usually, these “illusory sensations” do not affect our movements very much, “but where it really matters is when there is abnormal muscle force or reflexes in neurological disorders, which underlies a number of poorly-understood motor disorders, such as spasticity, rigidity, and dystonia,” says Ting. “The findings have implications in the study of impaired reflexes. Shifting how we understand the function of muscle proprioceptors can give us insight into these debilitating conditions.”
Ting’s team is now developing computational simulations that would allow them to predict the firing of muscle spindles during measured behaviors, such as balance control in humans.
“We want to develop methods that allow us to predict what is happening in the nervous system when we measure someone’s balance, or perform a knee-jerk response,” says Ting, whose co-authors included (in addition to lead-author Blum), Boris Lamonte D’Incamps and Daniel Zytnicki, both based at Université Paris Descartes.
Ting set out to understand how balance is impaired in sensory neuropathy, and she believes the research will help clarify how balance is impaired in Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. She wants to develop simulation of the fundamental stretch reflex response underlying those knee-jerk reactions, something that has always been difficult because of the long-held hypothesis about muscle spindles being sensitive to the length and velocity of muscles.
“But we now believe they are sensitive to the force and the rate change in force of muscle spindle fibers,” she says. “This finding may explain a lot of previously unexplained phenomena we see in sensorimotor behaviors and impairments.”
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Lu’s project, “Live imaging of the C. elegans connectome,” with Oliver Hobert of Columbia University, entails the development and dissemination of tools that empower the C.elegans neuroscience community to study the connectome of this nematode, which was the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced.
NSF’s NeuroNex awards bring together researchers across disciplines with new technologies and approaches, with the aim of yielding novel ways to tackle the mysteries of the brain.
“Through the development of advanced instrumentation to observe and model the brain, we're closer to our goal of building a more complete knowledge base about how neural activity produces behavior,” said Jim Olds, NSF assistant director for Biological Sciences.
“NeuroNex seeks to take that progress forward, by creating an ecosystem of new tools, resources, and theories,” Olds added. “Most importantly, NeuroNex aims to ensure their broad dissemination to the neuroscience community. With these awards, NSF is building a foundation for the next generation of research into the brain.”
Lu and Hobert, whose project is one of 17 to receive a NeuroNex award, have been awarded $739,277 for three years, starting September 1.
NeuroNex is part of NSF’s Understanding the Brain program, which is the avenue through which the foundation participates in the national Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, an ambitious alliance formed by the Obama Administration, bringing together federal agencies and other partners to enhance our understanding of the brain.
]]>Lu’s project, “Live imaging of the C. elegans connectome,” with Oliver Hobert of Columbia University, entails the development and dissemination of tools that empower the C.elegans neuroscience community to study the connectome of this nematode, which was the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced.
NSF’s NeuroNex awards bring together researchers across disciplines with new technologies and approaches, with the aim of yielding novel ways to tackle the mysteries of the brain.
“Through the development of advanced instrumentation to observe and model the brain, we're closer to our goal of building a more complete knowledge base about how neural activity produces behavior,” said Jim Olds, NSF assistant director for Biological Sciences.
“NeuroNex seeks to take that progress forward, by creating an ecosystem of new tools, resources, and theories,” Olds added. “Most importantly, NeuroNex aims to ensure their broad dissemination to the neuroscience community. With these awards, NSF is building a foundation for the next generation of research into the brain.”
Lu and Hobert, whose project is one of 17 to receive a NeuroNex award, have been awarded $739,277 for three years, starting September 1.
NeuroNex is part of NSF’s Understanding the Brain program, which is the avenue through which the foundation participates in the national Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, an ambitious alliance formed by the Obama Administration, bringing together federal agencies and other partners to enhance our understanding of the brain.
]]>It is a dense and noisy communication network, wrapped and hidden deep within precious tissue. We’ve pondered over, poked, and prodded the brain for centuries. But so much of what goes on inside our skulls is a mystery and neuro-research is still closer to the starting line than the finish.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, scientists and engineers from different backgrounds have formed an interdisciplinary research community called ‘GTNeuro.’ They’re out to improve our understanding of the brain and the entire nervous system, and they’re seeking and creating the means to treat neurological diseases and injuries, even boost neural function, bringing the mysteries of the human brain into clearer focus.
“There’s a large and growing community here, of people focused on basic science, translation, and technology related to a range of neurological diseases and disorders, and all of this is bolstered by a vibrant educational and training environment,” says Garrett Stanley, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME, a joint department of Emory and Georgia Tech).
Currently, there are more than 60 faculty researchers from Georgia Tech and Emory under the GTNeuro umbrella, and they come from the schools of Biological Sciences, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), Psychology, and Physics at Georgia Tech, in addition to BME and multiple departments and divisions at Emory.
“The activities at Georgia Tech represent an intersection of basic neuroscience, and engineering-driven neuro-technology, a synergy which is necessary to drive the field forward,” says Stanley, who co-chairs the faculty steering committee for GTNeuro (with Petit Institute researcher Todd Streelman, professor and chair in the School of Biological Sciences).
“GTNeuro is just a very organic, faculty-driven kind of thing,” says Stanley, who also co-chairs the Neural Engineering Center (one of the research centers based at the Petit Institute, which also houses the Neuro Design Suite, a core lab facility) with Lena Ting, a professor who joined the Coulter Department 15 years ago.
“We were a small but tightly integrated group in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering, which occupied the third floor of the Whikater Building,” says Ting.
The small neuro-community of six neuro-researchers (two ECE faculty members, and four from BME) included, in addition to Ting, current Petit Institute researchers Rob Butera and Michelle LaPlaca.
“We pooled resources and had an internal seminar series, shared a lab manager. It was a very tight knit community,” says Ting. “Back then, we were about the only neuroscience research on the Georgia Tech campus. Slowly, over the last 12 years or so, that has changed dramatically.”
The burgeoning interest in neuro-research (across disciplines and department boundaries) was exemplified recently in the 25th edition of the Suddath Symposium at the Petit Institute (Feb. 21-22). The focus was neuroscience. Thought leaders from across the country and overseas spent two days discussing their research at the symposium, where the theme was “Neuromodulation and Synaptic Control: Modern Tools and Applications.”
Every Monday in the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB), a packed room takes in the GTNeuro Seminar Series, in which a wide range of experts – from Georgia Tech, Emory, and beyond – present cutting edge research.
These popular seminars, which start at 11 a.m. in EBB Room 1005, are video-conferenced to Emory, and recorded (and made available through the Georgia Tech Library).
Recent speakers have come from Case Western, Princeton, Harvard, in addition to brain experts from right here. Most recently, Audrey Duarte from Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology presented a talk entitled, “What can neuroimaging tell us about age-related memory changes?” In two weeks, Mark Frye from UCLA will discuss how flies see the world. And later in March, Machelle Pardue of the Coulter Department will talk about how to improve detection and treatment of diabetic retinopathy.
“We’re attracting 80, 100 people on a weekly basis,” says Ting, who is based at Emory, where she now heads up the Neuromechanics Lab. “That really suggests that no matter what kind of topic we’re presenting, and it’s been diverse, people are hungry to learn about neuroscience.”
Modern neuroscience is about a century old, but research has really hastened over the past 20 years, mostly due to the development of new tools and technology, according to Stanley.
“Neuroscience has always pivoted around advances in techniques and technologies that enable us to better measure and manipulate different aspects of the networks of the tens of billions of neurons in the brain and the rest of the nervous system," he says.
Also, federal government support through programs like the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative are helping to drive research, “accelerating our understanding of both normal brain function, and function related to a range of neurological disorders,” says Stanley, whose own research is all about making sense of what all of those neurons are saying to each other.
The researchers who form GTNeuro are approaching the problem of understanding the brain and the nervous system from many directions with a diverse toolbox.
Ting’s work, for example, draws from neuroscience, biomechanics, rehabilitation, robotics, and physiology, which has led to discoveries of new principles of human movement. Her research is used by other researchers across the planet, to understand both normal and impaired movement control in humans and animals, and to develop better robotic devices.
Meanwhile, the lab of Petit Institute researcher Craig Forest is perfecting a robotic cleaning technique to automate and improve neuroscience research, and looking for ways to record what’s happening deep inside the brain.
“Our mission is to develop the tools that make new science possible,” says Forest, associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
His lab developed a technique that will allow the pipettes used in patch-clamping to be reused over and over again. Patch-camping, the method used to stimulate and record neuron activity, involves touching the cell membrane with a glass pipette – a painstaking, prolonged process, and these pipettes are typically used only once.
The new cleaning process, integrated with the Autopatcher (robotic patch-clamping technology from the Forest lab), saves money on pipettes while gathering more data, faster.
The lab of Hang Lu, Petit Institute researcher and professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, also is in the business of gathering large-scale data, through engineering BioMEMS (Bio Miro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) and microfluidic devices. These ‘Lab-on-a-chip’ tools are used to study how the nervous system develops and functions, and how genes and environment influence behavior.
“We’re a little different in terms of the space we occupy in neuro-research on campus,” says Lu, who was co-director with Stanley of the neuro-focused Suddath Symposium. “Functional researchers like Garrett or Rob Butera are very much down to the neurons and circuits. My lab’s approach is complementary.”
Butera (who holds a joint appointment in BME and ECE) and his lab colleagues have developed an implanted device that stimulates the vagus nerve to treat chronic inflammation, while also targeting and inhibiting unwanted nerve activity.
Butera was principal investigator of the vagus nerve study, but the lead researcher was grad student Yogi Patel, who represents the next generation of neuroengineering.
“We’re actually working with a clinician at Emory to try and push this into some human evaluation,” says Patel, a fifth-year Ph.D. student. “That’s the key thing, to get this approved so it can be used in patients. It’s very promising.”
So is his future in neuroscience research. He already has a postdoctoral position lined up at Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s a fundamental neuroscience lab, more science than engineering,” says Patel, who is also serving as a consultant to industry on the side. “Long term, I still want to have my own research lab one day.”
It’s an aspiration that became a reality for Annabelle Singer less than a year ago, when she joined the Coulter Department at Georgia Tech and Emory, where her lab is exploring how neural activity guides behavior in health and disease. She was a lead author of recently published research demonstrating a non-invasive, flickering light treatment that reduces the build-up of plaques closely associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
This radically different approach has lots of promise, she says, but like so much else in a relatively nascent field like neuroscience, there are flights of steps to go before it can be translated into therapeutics for humans. Singer believes she’s in the right place to take those steps.
“There’s a culture of collaboration here, a kind of unity of purpose,” says Singer, who also recently joined the Petit Institute. “That was a big appeal for me.”
So was Emory’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and the Neuro Design Suite at the Petit institute, and the complementary research of colleagues who are all trying to make better sense of the brain, like Stanley, who wants to read and write the neural code.
“Patterns of activity in the brain are a language of sorts, but a language we don’t yet understand,” he says.
It only weighs about 3.3 pounds, but the human brain is still mostly unexplored or virtually inaccessible. Stanley and his GTNeuro colleagues are out there, making their way and charting new paths in a gray matter frontier.
“How cells interact within the complex networks in our brain and nervous system underlies many diseases and disorders,” Stanley says. “The advent of new tools for dissecting circuits within the nervous system gives us, for the first time, the ability to actually ‘see’ and interact with the networks in a very specific and precise manner, perhaps leading to new insights and discoveries for treating a range of neurological disorders and diseases.”
LINKS:
Center for Advanced Brain Imaging
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
But it was a young, recently-minted Ph.D. in the area of chemical and biomolecular engineering who took center stage as the event unfolded. Suddath Award winner Christine He, from the lab of Petit Institute researcher Martha Grover, and with one foot out the door, delivered the first presentation of the symposium, and it had nothing to do with neuroscience.
Such is the nature of this well-attended, wide-ranging event. At the end of every calendar year, a doctoral student is selected as the Suddath Award winner, for having demonstrated a significant research achievement in biology, biochemistry, or biomedical engineering. In addition to the $1,000 first prize, the winner also is invited to present his or her research at the annual Suddath Symposium, regardless of whether or not it matches with the symposium’s selected theme.
He, the seventh woman in a row to earn the honor, presented her research project (entitled, “Building a Model Prebiotic Nucleic Acid Replication Cycle in Viscous Enivornments.”). And even though it was not about neuroscience, her presentation – delivered with the calmness of a seasoned pro – drew a packed room.
“I wasn’t really sure what to expect, so I was very pleased with the turnout,” said He, who opened the two-day symposium on Tuesday, then caught a plane Wednesday morning for her new assignment as a post-doc at the University of California-Berkeley, where she’ll be working in the lab of Jennifer Doudna, the scientist who co-invented pioneering new technology for editing genes, called CRISPR-Cas9.
“This is going to be exciting,” He said Tuesday evening, shortly before leaving for the next phase of her life.
Meanwhile, the neuroscientists and neuro-engineers kept packing the Suddath Room on the ground floor of the Petit Institute.
“This is an exciting time in neuroscience. Things are rapidly expanding in the field, especially here at Georgia Tech,” said Garrett Stanley, co-director of this year’s symposium with Hang Lu. Both are Petit Institute researchers.
Stanley is professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and Lu is a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering), both of them busily engaged in neuroscience research and members of the GTNeuro steering committee (GTNeuro is the umbrella organization of Georgia Tech’s neuro-community).
Featured researchers from out of town were Eve Marder (Brandeis University), Gero Miesenböck (University of Oxford, England), Vincent Pieribone (Yale University), William Shafer (Cambridge University, England), and Mark Schnitzer (Stanford University).
Researchers from the Atlanta area were Gordon Berman (Emory University), Bilal Haider (Coulter Department at Emory/Georgia Tech), Liang Han (Georgia Tech), Ravi Kane (Georgia Tech), Paul Katz (Georgia State University), Robert Liu (Emory), Patrick McGrath (Georgia Tech), Annabelle Singer (Coulter Department at Emory/Georgia Tech), Sam Sober (Emory), Zhexing Wen (Emory), and Larry Young (Emory).
“The goal is to highlight some of the excitement of neuroscience and neuro-technology from our community, but also to talk to non-neuroscientists and get them excited,” said Stanley. “So we brought in people from across the U.S. and abroad, an exciting array of speakers. I think the interest and attendance at this symposium is a reflection of the growing interest in the field. And really, we’re just getting started.”
LINKS:
2017 Suddath Symposium program
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
One of the first authors of the report, published today in eLife, is Chethan Pandarinath, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Pandarinath helped lead the research at Stanford before his recent move to Emory and Georgia Tech.
"The performance is really exciting," said Pandarinath, in a Stanford news release. "We're achieving communication rates that many people with arm and hand paralysis would find useful. That's a critical step for making devices that could be suitable for real-world use."
The research team worked with two people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and one person with spinal cord injury. They each had small, pill-sized electrode arrays implanted into their brains, allowing the researchers to read out electrical activity as the individuals thought about moving. The researchers then decoded this activity to allow the participants to control a cursor on a computer screen and type out words and messages.
"Here at Emory, we will follow-up on this work in several ways," says Pandarinath. "First, while this is a promising proof-of-concept, in the long-term we want to be able to restore much more function, for instance, being able to control a robotic arm with this same level of performance, to enable reaching and grasping of objects."
Over the next few years Pandarinath and his Atlanta biomedical engineering team plan to bring a clinical trial of brain-machine interfaces to Emory and Georgia Tech, where they can further push the performance of these devices by leveraging partnerships with world-class clinical resources and engineering across both communities. That includes neurosurgery and neurology at Emory and engineering at Georgia Tech.
"Second, ultimately we want brain-machine interfaces that restore more natural control of external devices. To do so we want to be able to restore sensation as well -- providing the user with sensory feedback so they can 'feel' when they grasp objects. To do this we need to 'write' that information into the brain (rather than just reading information out)," says Pandarinath.
In order to do that, he explains, the team will need a better understanding of what natural sensory responses look like and develop new technologies for interfacing with the brain. His laboratory is developing new techniques in animal models, and they hope to eventually translate those techniques into human subjects.
Resources:
Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
That can be a nagging question in some medical decisions, where side effects are possible. But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have figured out a way to keep what helps, while blocking what harms, in a type of therapy to fight serious chronic inflammatory diseases.
It’s simple and works a little like a pacemaker: An implanted device electrically stimulates the vagus nerve, but, in addition, inhibits unwanted nerve activity in a targeted manner.
Forms of vagus nerve stimulation treatment against chronic inflammation have already been successfully tested in humans by private industry with the intent to make them available to patients. But the innovation by Georgia Tech researchers of adding an inhibiting signal could increase the clinical efficacy and therapeutic benefit of existing treatments.
“We use an electrode with a kilohertz frequency that blocks unwanted nerve conduction in addition to the electrode that stimulates nerve activity,” said principal investigator Robert Butera, a professor jointly appointed in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “We’ve arranged the two near each other, so the blocking electrode forces the stimulation from the stimulating electrode to only go in one direction.”
The researchers’ innovation could theoretically by implemented relatively quickly by augmenting existing clinical devices. So far, tests in rats have returned very encouraging results, and they have been achieved without taking more drastic measures notable in other experiments to optimize this kind of treatment – such as a vagotomy, the cutting of part of the vagus.
“The original studies in animals on the anti-inflammatory benefits of vagus nerve stimulation resorted to nerve transections to achieve directional stimulation as well as boost effectiveness of nerve stimulation. But cutting the vagus is not clinically viable, due to the multitude of vital bodily functions it monitors and regulates. Our approach provides the same therapeutic benefit, but is also immediately reversible, controllable, and clinically feasible,” said lead researcher Yogi Patel, a bioengineering graduate student.
“We call it a virtual vagotomy,” Butera said.
Patel, Butera and former Georgia Tech researchers Tarun Saxena and Ravi V. Bellamkonda, published the results of their study in the journal Scientific Reports, which is published by Nature Publishing Group, on Thursday, January 5, 2017. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Ian’s Friends Foundation.
To understand how this new bioelectronic fine-tuning works, let’s start with the vagus nerve itself.
It lies outside the spinal column and runs in two parts down the front of your neck on either side. It’s easy to forget about because, though it does help you feel some limited sensations like pain and heat from a handful of internal organs, those sensations are not as blatant and common as when you reach out and touch something with your hand.
Your voluntary, or somatic, nervous system is responsible for the reaching, touching, and feeling, and the vagus nerve belongs to your involuntary nervous system – actually called the autonomic nervous system. Though you may experience the effects less consciously, you couldn’t survive without a vagus.
“The vagus nerve conveys an incredible amount of information related to the state and function of the visceral organs – your digestive tract, your heart, your lungs, information about the nutrients you eat – anything required for homeostasis (physiological balance),” Patel said.
The vagus nerve is the lifeline between the vital function control centers of your brain and your visceral organs, passing messages constantly between your hypothalamus and organs to control things like pulse and respiration, certain secretions, and the limiting of immune response.
That last one is where inflammation comes in, because it's part of the body's natural immune response. But when the immune system becomes hyperactive, it can attack not just pathogens but also uninfected tissue, as with patients suffering from diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease. Drug-based therapies often fail to significantly benefit them.
The two parts of the autonomic (involuntary) nervous system -- the sympathetic and the parasympathetic -- strongly influence your immune system. The vagus nerve belongs to the parasympathetic.
“It’s like a seesaw system. Your sympathetic nervous system helps kick the immune system on, and the parasympathetic nervous system tempers it,” Patel said.
Stimulating the vagus nerve supports that tempering effect, but it can also somewhat excite the part of the nervous system that stimulates the immune response, which is counterproductive if you're looking to calm it.
“Every circuit has a path coming from the brain and one going to the brain, and when you stimulate electrically, you usually have no control over which one you get. You usually get both.” Patel said. These paths are often in the same nerve being stimulated.
The path leaving the brain and going toward other organs, called the efferent pathway, is the one to stimulate to temper the immune system and help relieve chronic inflammatory conditions. The one going to the brain, called the afferent pathway, if stimulated, leads eventually to the hypothalamus, a pea-sized region in the center of the brain. That triggers a chain of hormonal responses, eventually releasing cytokines, messaging molecules that promote inflammation.
“You get a heightened inflammatory response when you stimulate the afferent pathways, which are actively conveying information about your internal state and trigger the immune system when necessary,” Patel said. “And if a patient is already in a hyperactive immune state, you don’t want to push that even more."
Stimulating downward (efferent), while blocking upward (afferent) vagus nerve activity keeps the good effect while preventing possible bad effects. In animals that received this treatment, blood tests showed that inflammation markedly decreased. Most importantly, this treatment can be turned on or off, and be tuned to the needs of each patient.
No additional authors were involved in the study, which was performed at Georgia Tech. Two of the authors, Saxena and Bellamkonda, are now at Duke University. Research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant 2R01EB016407) and Ian’s Friends Foundation. All findings, conclusions, and opinions are those of the authors and do not represent views of the funding agencies.
]]>404-660-1408
ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu
]]>Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are exposing these secrets -- micron-sized bumps and grooves -- and the intricate web of gene mutations possibly behind them in high detail. Their computational genetics work using digital optics could prove useful to understanding debilitating disorders.
“When these faint mutations come together, it gives you a ginormous boost in disease risk,” said Hang Lu, a professor who applies engineering and data science to the study of neurology.
“If you look at psychiatric diseases, anything that is relevant to humans, what you see is not that dramatic,” Lu said. “Brains of people who had schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or autism don’t look physically very different from healthy brains. It’s not like they’re missing a chunk.”
Researchers led by Lu at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering have developed algorithms and special microscope slide to expose previously unseen neurological nuances and intricate mutations that may be behind them. But their findings could apply as well to computational genetics research pursuing other diseases such as autoimmune disorders.
Lu and former Georgia Tech researcher Adrianna San-Miguel published their latest results on Wednesday, November 23, 2016, in the journal Nature Communications. Their research was funded by the National Institute of General Medicine, and the National Institute on Aging, both agencies of the National Institutes of Health.
Lu has replaced the fallible human eye with a proficient computer to pin down faintest phenotypes, the geneticist’s term for physical traits based on genes. In the latest experiment, nerve proteins were marked to appear as dots on roundworms' undersides for the computer to scan.
When mutations occur, the dots can change ever so slightly. “To the naked eye, they’re just dots on a dark background,” Lu said. But the computer sees in them phenotypical shifts.
Roundworm Caenorbabditis elegans, used in the experiment, helps scientists understand what may be going on in humans, because its nerves share strong similarities with ours. Ultimately, Lu wants the insights gained in studying them to lead to localizing genetic biomarkers for diseases in humans.
The Georgia Tech scientists narrowed their focus to synapses on a single neuron where it connects to muscles. These “synaptic puncta” were tagged with a glowing green protein to form the dots.
Some mutations did cause big shifts in dot position and size that the naked eye could actually pick up. And traditionally, forward geneticists -- geneticists who follow changes in phenotypes to see if they can find genes that cause them -- have used their eyes and microscopes to pick out such really obvious changes.
But natural limitations on human perception have introduced a bias, Lu said. Her research aims to reduce it to boost the amount of data scientists can gather.
Here’s how the bias roughly works. Sorting mutants from non-mutants in the lab is usually tedious with the tiny worms, and that has consequences for science.
“The normal way of doing it would be to take a little platinum wire and literally go under the microscope, pick up a worm, drug it, mount it on a slide, and then you have to recover it alive, if you think it's interesting,” Lu said.
The tedium plus the limited abilities of the human eye lead researchers looking for mutations to single out worms that are markedly odd. Eye-popping phenotypes are namely likely to be caused by genotypic changes, i.e. mutations, so finding a clear phenotype is likely to lead to a successful research outcome.
As a result, researchers might overlook subtle samples. In addition, amassing enough of them to determine important nuances may prove too difficult to do, and quirks can get in the way, too. For example, a single weird-looking worm might not be a mutant at all.
“You can always find a ‘wildtype’ (basically normal worm) that looks nothing at all like a wildtype,” Lu said. “It’s just a crazy wildtype. Genotypically, it looks like everybody else, but phenotypically it’s so different."
Why? Because nature can be stochastic – sort of random -- and mess up an individual worm, even when there’s no mutated gene.
Looks can deceive the eye, but they’re less likely to fool a high-resolution camera connected to a computer and an algorithm that statistically examines faint variations in order to sort mutants from non-mutants.
Lu’s technique works via a transparent slide with tiny tubes that suck in one worm at a time under the computer's microscope. “Then we freeze the worm for a moment, so we can take its picture,” Lu said. “Then it unfreezes, and it’s totally okay.”
There’s a fork in the tube holding the worm. If the algorithm detects a mutant based on its synaptic puncta pattern in the image – even if this is not visible to the eye – the worm gets sucked down the first path for further study. If it isn’t a mutant, it gets sucked down the second path.
In the latest experiment, the algorithm analyzed phenotypic variations in the synaptic puncta of large worm populations. Parallel to that, the worms' genomes were analyzed to determine which phenotypical differences may be connected to mutated genes.
Then the researchers mapped out genotypes in relation to the differences in phenotypes they underpinned. What was so nuanced before that it was virtually invisible, turned out to be a large, filigree web.
Then there was a particularly lucky find that made for a good metaphor for the study and its potential to advance research. The scientists stumbled upon a very subtle allele – a variation of a gene caused by mutation.
The worms that had the allele were real mutants, but no one would have guessed it, because to the eye, they were completely neat and normal. They even behaved normally at first glance, and the researchers thought the computer may have sorted them out as mutants by mistake -- until a hitch turned up.
“After they swam for about 40 minutes, they got really, really weak and couldn’t swim well anymore,” Lu said. The allele seemed to be associated with some kind of neurological disorder.
“Seen as a metaphor, this is an example of how you might identify something that is relevant to a disease but incredibly subtle,” she said, “and you would never have found it using eyes and a microscope.”
The research paper was coauthored by Matthew M. Crane, Yuehui Zhao, and Patrick McGrath of Georgia Tech, and Peri Kurshan and Kang Shen of Stanford University. The research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (numbers R01GM088333 and K99AG046911) Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agency.
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Scientists have known that certain diseases negatively affect normal brain wave activity, particularly the type known as gamma oscillations which are in the range of 30-90 Hz. These oscillations are associated with neural processes that include learning and memory; the disruption of these oscillations is associated with Alzheimer’s disease, brain trauma, and schizophrenia. This disruption may be contributing to the build-up of beta amyloid proteins (plaques) — a common hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
Success with a series of biochemical, neural modifications to improve gamma activity and reduce beta amyloid build up in mice transitioned to the idea of using a noninvasive light technique to induce the same brain wave modification. Previous research showed that flickering light at specific frequencies induced gamma oscillations in the brain.
To the delight of researchers, this noninvasive flickering light treatment delivered at a specific frequency to induce gamma oscillation brain waves suppressed beta amyloid production and invigorated microglia — immune cells responsible for eliminating plaque buildup.
“We found that gamma brain waves were weaker in mice programmed to develop Alzheimer’s, even before plaques built up and mice had memory problems,” said Singer. “That led us to wonder if we could drive gamma brain waves to alter amyloid, the protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s and forms plaques.”
When the researchers drove gamma, using both optogenetics and non-invasive light flicker, they found amyloid levels were drastically reduced.
“We found that driving gamma had two beneficial effects,” Singer said. “First, amyloid production slowed down. And second microglia, immune cells that act like trash collectors in the brain, changed so that they collected more amyloid.”
Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and, eventually, the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease and unless it can be effectively treated or prevented, the number of people affected will increase significantly as current population growth continues. Alzheimer’s is currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
“While there are many steps to go to translate these discoveries in mice to a therapy for humans with Alzheimer’s, we think this radically different, non-invasive approach is very promising,” Singer said. “We are working hard on the next steps: Figuring out the most effective way to non-invasively drive gamma in brain regions essential for learning and memory and testing out this approach in humans.”
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They gathered to deliver a collective “state of the union” for neuro activities on campus, and to introduce GTNeuro as the umbrella campus effort covering a wide range of research, education, and outreach activities related to neuroscience and neurotechnology.
Serving as a kind of community association, GTNeuro’s partner efforts are based in different units, like the Neural Engineering Center and the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging (CABI), both at Georgia Tech.
“Georgia Tech has enduring strength at the interface between basic neuroscience and neurotechnology and innovation, and is well-positioned to significantly strengthen efforts through key strategic moves,” said Garrett Stanley, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and co-chair of the GT Neuro steering committee.
The other co-chair is Todd Streelman, professor in the School of Biology and, like Stanley, a member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Additional partner efforts were introduced, such as the Emory Neuromodulation and Technology Innovation Center and the Emory/Georgia Tech Computational Neuroscience Training Program. The neuro-group also outlined plans for future events, including a campus-wide GTNeuro seminar series.
NeuroDay 2016 was sponsored by the Joyce M. and Warren K. Wells Endowment for Neuroengineering.
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A team of collaborative researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University set out to find the answers. Their study, from the lab of Petit Institute researcher Lena Ting and published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, compares the movements of professional ballet dancers to individuals with no training.
The research showed that years of ballet training changed how the nervous system coordinated muscles for walking and balancing behavior. The team’s discoveries may also implications for rehabilitation medicine.
Read more about the research from the Ting lab.
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Christine Payne and Garrett Stanley, both faculty members of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, are among the 131 investigators working at 125 institutions in the U.S. and eight other countries receiving 67 new awards, totaling more than $38 million.
Payne, Stanley and their collaborators are part of a new round of projects for visualizing the brain in action. It’s all part of the initiative launched by President Obama in 2014 as a wide-spread effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights for treating a range of brain disorders, like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy and traumatic brain injury.
Stanley and Dieter Jaeger, professor in Emory University’s Department of Biology, are principal investigators of a project titled, “Multiscale Analysis of Sensory-Motor Cortical Gating in Behaving Mice.”
Their overall goal is better understand and capture the flow of information as we sense and perceive the outside world, “so that we can take action,” says Stanley, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), a joint department of Emory and Georgia Tech.
The Stanley lab provides expertise on tactile sensing and information processing, while the Jaeger lab provides expertise on motor/muscle coordination and control.
“We are developing approaches to using genetically expressed voltage sensors to optically image brain activity during a sensory-motor task,” Stanley says.
The new technology would let the researchers monitor brain activity at high spatial and temporal resolution over long periods of time.
“It allows us to address questions related to the circuits involved in coordinating the relationship between sensing and action for the first time,” Stanley says.
The project grew out of another collaboration between Jaeger and Stanley. They are co-principal investigators of an NIH-sponsored training grant in computational neuroscience, which targets a new generation of scientists bound together through questions about how the brain computes.
“Through this interaction, Dieter and I got to know each other better, started to talk more science, and eventually cooked up this project,” Stanley says. “The research is relevant to public health because it provides an impactful and innovative study of the circuitry underlying the output from the basal ganglia to the motor cortex and the integration of basal ganglia output with sensory information.”
Debilitating and difficult to treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and dystonia are caused by dysfunction of this circuitry.
“The proposed research is expected to provide basic insights into motor circuit function and may reveal new possibilities for treatment of these diseases as well as a better understanding of deep brain stimulation treatments already in use,” says Stanley, who was part of the first round of BRAIN Initiative funding last year with fellow Georgia Tech researcher Craig Forest.
Peter Borden, a Ph.D. student in Stanley’s lab, and Christian Waiblinger, a postdoctoral researcher in Stanley’s lab, will also be contributing to the research.
Meanwhile, Payne is principal investigator for a project titled, “Conducting polymer nanowires for neural modulation.” She’s collaborating with Bret Flanders, a professor at Kansas State whose lab is working on new ways to insulate nanowires. Georgia Tech students Scott Thourson (a Bioengineering Ph.D. candidate) and Rohan Kadambi (undergrad in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) are helping to lead the effort.
“Understanding how the brain functions requires fundamentally new tools to probe individual neurons without damaging the surrounding tissue,” says Payne, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
“This research will develop a prototype device that uses biocompatible conducting polymer nanowires to interface with individual neurons,” says Payne. “The use of flexible conducting polymers in place of traditional metal, silicon, and carbon electrodes is expected to minimize disruption to the surrounding tissue.”
The new round of funding brings the NIH investment for BRAIN Initiative research to $85 million in fiscal year 2015. Last year NIH awarded $46 million to the effort, designed to ultimately catalyze new treatments and cures for devastating brain disorders and diseases that are estimated by the World Health Organization to affect more than one billion people on the planet.
“Georgia Tech is proud to play a role in this important global effort,” says Steve Cross, Tech's executive vice president for research. “These grants are further evidence of Tech’s reputation for conducting world-class bioengineering and bioscience research.”
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The electromagnetically shielded in vivo extracellular electrophysiology rig is constructed with various elements, including Zesis surgical microscopes, a 128-channel Tucker Davis Technologies data acquisition system (RZ2), Kopf stereotaxic frames, and DC temperature controllers to enable stable, reliable and high-quality recordings. Also, a complete LED driver system (Thorlabs) was equipped to this rig to facilitate optogenetic in vivo experiments.
Automatic patch clamping devices (autopatchers) are also attached to both in vitro and in vivo patch clamping rigs to obtain high yield and high quality whole cell recordings.
Forest and Stanley, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), were awarded BRAIN Initiative funding from the NIH for their project entitled, “In-vivo circuit activity measurement at single cell, sub-threshold resolution,” research that could only happen with the best tools available.
“We can use these tools not only to record what’s happening in cells, at the level of a single cell, but also in cells that are in two different brain regions simultaneously,” says Forest. “In each region we can record activity within a single cell, at the sub-threshold resolution of a single cell. No one’s been able to do that before. We can record cells talking to each other in a living brain.”
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience