Category Archives: News

Director’s channel – Fall 2021

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Paul Katz, IONs Director

Excuse me, it’s been a while since I have written; there have been technical difficulties in putting out the newsletter. But frankly, I was feeling malaise after the initial hope in June that the pandemic was over. I’m allowing myself to feel hopeful again as the case numbers continue to decrease and the vaccination rate continues to rise. We are having in-person seminars again and it feels great to be in the presence of people and have those little unplanned conversations, which are so important in science. To help those along, I’m excited that we’ll be hosting an Interdisciplinary Neuroscience, Computer Science, & Engineering Poster Conference on Tuesday, November 2nd. Researchers from three colleges will be meeting and sharing their work and getting to know one another to build collaborations. Much of the future of neuroscience lies in collaborative team science that incorporates the skills and expertise of computer scientists and engineers. To build the bridges across disciplines, we have started a series of faculty forums to allow faculty meet and find the threads that can be woven together into new and interesting patterns. I’m excited to see what new ideas emerge from these.

UMass Neurosciences Publications – Summer 2021

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Richard Van Emmerik

This summer’s featured researcher is Professor Richard Van Emmerik, who is chair of the Department of Kinesiology in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Richard’s lab works on human motor control. They apply dynamical systems theory to understand the control and coordination of human movement and posture. This summer, they published results of their research in the journal Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders in a paper titled, “Non-ambulatory measures of lower extremity sensorimotor function are associated with walking function in Multiple Sclerosis”

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in June, July, and August. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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Mélise Edwards awarded HHMI Gilliam fellowship

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Congratulations to Mélise Edwards and Agnès Lacreuse on being awarded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellowship! This award is given to outstanding graduate students and their advisers with the goal of supporting students from underrepresented groups in their pursuit in preparing for leadership roles in scientific fields, particularly with a focus on advancing diversity and inclusion in the sciences.

Only 50 pairs of students and their advisers were selected for the 2021 Gilliam Fellowship program. They span 38 academic institutions across the country with research ranging from life sciences to biomed.

Through this Fellowship Mélise and Professor Lacreuse have leadership and research training opportunities, with a focus on inclusion and cultural awareness with monthly online training sessions, two in-person workshops in Maryland, and an annual meeting of all Fellows and their advisers. They will also receive $50,000 per year up to 3 years. To be eligible for the program, Fellows must be enrolled in their 2nd or 3rd year of a PhD program in biomedical or life sciences, be from a racial, ethnic or other underrepresented group, and demonstrate a commitment to furthering inclusion and diversity in the field of science.

The NSB community is proud and excited and extends a group congratulations to both Mélise and Agnès!

ChangHui Pak and Gerry Downes awarded the Armstrong Fund for Science

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The Armstrong Fund for Science was established in 2006 by benefactors John and Elizabeth Armstrong to help research projects gain more ground before they are eligible for traditional grants. The 2021 award was given to Biology’s Gerald Downes, and MCB’s ChangHui Pak for their collaborative research into the disruption of brain development by the mutation of a gene, TBCK. Mutations of the gene cause a rare condition called TBCK Syndrome. Professors Pak and Downes will receive funding of $40,000 for 2 years for the preliminary research needed to prepare for a larger research project.

ChangHui and Gerry hope to learn more about how the mutations in the TBCK gene cause the debilitating syndrome which leads to a high rate of mortality in children and adolescents with progressive loss of muscle tone, intellectual disability, and drug-resistant epilepsy among some of the symptoms. The collaboration will involve the zebrafish that the Downes Lab has already engineered with TBCK syndrome. Pak will be using pluripotent stem cells that will be engineered with the mutations specific to TBCK syndrome, grow them into neurons and compare the mutated cells with healthy cells. They are both excited to work together learning from each model.

The entire neuroscience community extends an enthusiastic congratulations and will look forward to seeing the progress!

UMass Neurosciences Publications – May 2021

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Qiangfei Xia

This month’s featured researcher is Qiangfei Xia, who is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Qiangfei works in the area of nanoelectronics. His research group is developing energy-efficient hardware systems for machine intelligence, security, sensing and communication. He is an author on a paper that recently appeared in Frontiers in Nanotechnology, “Engineering Tunneling Selector to Achieve High Non-linearity for 1S1R Integration“, which describes technology to increase the density-packing of memristors, which can act like artificial synapses.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in May. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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Director’s Channel – May 2021

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Paul Katz
Paul Katz, IONs Director

As the semester draws to a close, we are starting to think about a non-virtual world again. Over half the population of Massachusetts has now received at least one dose of the vaccine. UMass will be requiring all students to be vaccinated before returning in the fall when classes will once again be face-to-face. I am looking forward to seeing students and colleagues again. However, I hope that the “normal” that we return to after the pandemic is a more enlightened one than the one we had before.

It has been a very difficult year with the pandemic, the insurrection at the Capitol, and the public murder of George Floyd and other people of color. The continued trauma from structural racism led to a groundswell of activism this year. Here at UMass, NSB student Wayne Barnaby helped lead that activism, by initiating a petition to the administration. He was recognized for his leadership by a College Award for Excellence. NSB faculty member Karine Fénelon was also recognized with this award for the leadership role that she played this year in the racial reckoning on campus. I wish that they did not need to devote energy to this issue; I wish that we could be celebrating their science instead of their activism. But, this important work is what will lead us to a new, more enlightened “normal”.

UMass Neurosciences Publications – April 2021

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This month’s featured researcher is Kirby Deater-Deckard. Kirby is a Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. He is also the Graduate Program Director for the Neuroscience and Behavior Graduate Program. He runs the Individual Differences in Development Lab, which conducts research on facets of human development spanning cognition, emotion, and behavior, emphasizing the interaction of biological and environmental factors. He is co-author on a paper that appeared in Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience entitled, “Maltreatment and brain development: The effects of abuse and neglect on longitudinal trajectories of neural activation during risk processing and cognitive control”.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in April. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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Director’s Channel – April 2021

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Paul Katz
Paul Katz, IONs Director

It’s been just over a year now since our world went virtual. Zoom meetings, online teaching, COVID-19 testing have all become routine. Now that people are starting to be vaccinated, I’m hopeful that by fall we can resume in-person instruction, that labs can operate at full capacity, and that conferences can be held in person. Although, it’s been great to hear talks from people all around the world, we have missed out on the casual interactions, the serendipitous discussions that lead to different ways of thinking. In fact, all of the major breaks in my career have come from interactions at conferences.

Last year, we canceled the annual UMass Interdisciplinary Neurosciences conference because of the campus shutdown. We decided not to hold a virtual conference this year because personal interactions are the heart of such a local meeting. I’m confident that we will resume the tradition in the spring of 2022 when it is safe to meet in person again.

In the meantime, we continue our great lineup of virtual neuroscience speakers in April including a Distinguished Lecture by Lynn Nadel. His book, co-authored with Nobel laureate John O’Keefe, “The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map” has framed neuroscience research on learning and memory over the last half century. Although, it would have been nice to meet Dr. Nadel in person, I am still excited to hear his perspective on the progress made in this field.

UMass Neurosciences Publications – March 2021

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ChangHui Pak

This month’s featured researcher is ChangHui Pak, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Her lab investigates how cell adhesion and cell signaling guides synaptic connectivity in the developing human brain with the ultimate goal of understanding how synaptic dysfunction arising from genetic mutations in synaptic molecules contributes to neuropsychiatric disorders. She has two publications appearing in PubMed this month, one is a review of Neurexin gene variation and the other is a primary research paper in collaboration with Yubing Sun from Mechanical and Industrial Engineering that reports about the development of a new device that creates a local chemical microenvironment for engineering organotypic structures in vitro. This work arose from an IONs seed grant.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in March. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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Mélise Edwards awarded Ford Foundation Fellowship

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Mélise Edwards

Mélise Edwards, 2nd year student in the Lacreuse lab (co-advised by Courtney Babbitt), received a prestigious Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, which will support 3 years of her PhD research. This competitive fellowship, funded through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, supports individuals “who can demonstrate superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students”.

Her research will compare gene expression in specific brain regions in marmosets treated with an aromatase inhibitor (Letrozole) compared to marmosets treated with a placebo. Aromatase inhibitors are commonly administered to women with estrogen-responsive breast cancers because they suppress estrogen synthesis. Unfortunately, they are also associated with cognitive dysfunction, sleep disturbances and mood disorders and little is known about the underlying mechanisms.

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Director’s Channel – March 2021

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Paul Katz
IONs Director, Paul Katz

Despite our continued vigilance to slow the spread of the corona virus, there is a lot going on in the neurosciences at UMass. There are many exciting seminars and virtual events happening in March including a Distinguished Lecture by Catherine Dulac. If you missed last month’s Distinguished Lecture by Larry Abbott, you can watch the recording. This month, there are also neuroscience talks in the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) seminar series and the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) seminar series. This points to the truly interdisciplinary nature of the neurosciences at UMass. The featured researcher is Deepak Ganesan, who is a professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences. His work on sleep monitoring intersects with other neuroscientists on campus. I am excited by the diversity of topics that we see in the neurosciences at UMass as well as the diversity of speakers.

UMass Neurosciences Publications – February 2021

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Deepak Ganesan

This month’s featured researcher is Deepak Ganesan. He is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences. This month, he was the senior author on a paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research entitled, “Effect of Sleep and Biobehavioral Patterns on Multidimensional Cognitive Performance: Longitudinal, In-the-Wild Study“. Deepak’s group is building wearable sensors for monitoring health. His work involves low-power sensing and communication, networked systems, and machine learning. His recent work includes the design of ultra-low passive radios for wearables, novel wearable technologies such as low-power eye trackers to monitor health signals, and robust detection of important health targets such as drug use, smoking, and over-eating

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in February. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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Director’s Channel – February 2021

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IONs Director, Paul Katz

Neuroscience is continuing to grow at UMass. We welcome a number of new faculty members who are starting their labs. One of them, Jennifer Rauch, will be presenting her work at a Neuroscience & Behavior Seminar on February 17th. Computational Neuroscientist, Larry Abbott from Columbia University will present a Neuroscience Distinguished Lecture on February 10th. Dr. Abbott has given some of the most eloquent explanations of computations that I have ever seen. He has the ability to take difficult subjects and convey their essence.

Over the last few months, I have been working with engineering and computer science faculty to submit an NSF graduate training grant in Biological Neurotechnology. We are building a training program that will enable our students to work in teams across disciplines and make the next advances in the neurosciences. The future of research on the brain is dependent upon technological advances in recording technology and machine learning, both of which are strengths at UMass. I am looking forward to seeing new collaborations emerge on this campus to tackle the most challenging research questions.

UMass Neurosciences Publications – January 2021

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This month’s featured researcher is Madalina Fiterau Brostean. Ina, as she is called, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Science. Among the projects that her lab works on is Project 4Thought, which uses deep learning algorithms to identify subjects who will get Alzheimer’s at least 2 years ahead of the standard diagnosis. She was a contributing author on a recent paper that examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the academic community.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in January. They are just a fraction of the research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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