The Neuroscience Community at UMass is expanding with the addition of two new faculty members.
Sally Kim, is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Amherst College who joined the UMass Neuroscience and Behavior program as graduate faculty this summer. Dr. Kim completed her PhD. at University of Texas, Houston followed by work as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology and Research Scientist at Stanford University.
Her research interests are fueled by a passion for understanding the molecular basis of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders after working with children in a psychiatric hospital post undergraduate studies. Her lab is studying the role of zinc as a dynamic regulator for synaptic signaling and function using an interdisciplinary approach of molecular, cellular, biochemical, and optical methods. Their research seeks to understand the basic mechanisms of zinc signaling in neurons and bridge this understanding for potential translational applications for autism and neurodegeneration. To tackle these questions, they develop novel tools to gain access to the necessary molecular, spatial and temporal domains to dissect these pathways.
Joyita Dutta is a new Associate Professor in the department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass. Professor Dutta completed her PhD. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2011. Following the completion of her PhD., Dr. Dutta began work as a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital where she later began teaching. She began her career in the University of Massachusetts system at Lowell in 2015.
Her expertise is in biomedical image reconstruction and analysis and her research interests include signal processing and machine learning techniques for imaging (e.g. PET, MRI), graph (e.g. brain network), and time-series (e.g., accelerometry, ECG) datasets; multimodality information integration for image reconstruction, processing, and analysis, along with applications to neurology: Tau and amyloid imaging and graph-based brain network analysis for Alzheimer’s disease.