This month’s featured researcher is Nilanjana “Buju” Dasgupta. Buju is a professor in Psychological & Brain Sciences and the Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences. Her research focuses on implicit bias. Her recent publication in Cognitive Research: Principles & Implicatations, which was in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Sanders, is titled, “Anger, race, and the neurocognition of threat: attention, inhibition, and error processing during a weapon identification task.” This study has important implications for social justice. It uses measurements of neural activity to examine whether anger impacts threat assessment.

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

Annabelle Flores-Bonilla is a 2nd year student in the NSB program in Dr. Heather Richardson’s lab. She received her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico in 2019. Annabelle was a fellow in the UMass Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP), which is funded by the National Institutes of Health. As a PREP student, she started a project studying sex differences in alcohol drinking behavior, which was recently published in the journal Biology Sex Differences.

Publication: Flores-Bonilla A, De Oliveria B, Silva-Gotay, A, Lucier KW, Richardson HN (2021). Shortening time for access to alcohol drives up front-loading behavior, bringing consumption in male rats to the level of females. Biology of Sex Differences.12, 51

The featured researcher is Heather Richardson, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Heather’s lab studies the neurobiology of stress and addiction. They have two papers that just appeared in Pubmed authored by two of her graduate students in the Neuroscience & Behavior graduate program. Andrea Silva-Gotay is the first author on a paper published in the journal Neuropharmacology that examines the effect of alcohol on Interleukin-1 beta and Toll-like receptor 4 gene expression in adolescent rats. The other paper is authored by Annabelle Flores-Bonilla, a 2nd year PhD student, who is featured in the Student spotlight this month.

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

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.

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.

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.

This month’s featured researcher is Daniel Vahaba. Dan is a Mellon visiting assistant professor in public discourse in biology, biochemistry and neuroscience at Smith College. He is interested in how scientists communicate information and also how birds communicate. He received his PhD from UMass in 2018 in the lab of Luke Remage-Healey. They recently had a paper appear in the Nature Scientific Reports, “Neuroestrogen synthesis modifies neural representations of learned song without altering vocal imitation in developing songbirds“. This paper shows that hormones have many different effects on the neural circuits involved in learning bird song.

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