Dayna Johnson, PhD, MPH, MSW, MS
Assistant Professor
Emory University
Dr. Johnson will utilize a socioecological framework to discuss sleep health and sleep health disparities across the life course. Using data from large epidemiologic studies, she will present empirical research on the determinants of sleep health disparities. Dr. Johnson will discuss the current evidence supporting sleep as a strategy to improve cardiovascular health and health disparities.
The Office of University Postdoctoral Affairs (OUPA) at Brown University is pleased to announce the second annual postdoctoral research symposium on Monday, March 25, 2024 in the Salomon Center and Sayles Hall. This symposium will feature the innovative research being conducted by postdoctoral scholars at Brown and include the following:
Details, including information about the keynote address, instructions for how to participate in the poster session, and the event schedule, are available on the official symposium website.
Please note, only individuals with a current appointment at Brown University as a postdoctoral research associate, postdoctoral fellow, or an equivalent postdoctoral appointment at a Brown-affiliated hospital may present their research during the poster session in Sayles Hall. However, all members of the Brown community are welcome to attend the programming in the Salomon Center and poster session in Sayles Hall to network and learn about the research being conducted by postdocs at Brown.
Learn more about the symposium at the official website here.
“Piecing the Puzzle Together: Building a Bridge to Discovery Using Health Informatics Approaches for Autism Spectrum Disorder”
Advisor: Dr. Elizabeth Chen
Children with high-needs, including those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), require extensive medical, behavioral, and educational support due to their complex conditions. These challenges necessitate innovative data-driven approaches to inform decision-making and improve care. The Learning Health System (LHS) framework systematically incorporates data-driven insights and evidence-based knowledge into healthcare practice to enhance patient outcomes.
This dissertation focuses on the knowledge discovery aspect of LHS by using a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative insights and computational findings to inform a tailored healthcare intervention. The three aims are to: (1) Conduct an in-depth qualitative study with caregivers of children with high-needs to examine unmet needs, social challenges, emotional impacts, and essential resources; (2) Use computational methods to study the ASD population and associated comorbidities using statewide clinical data; and, (3) Integrate the qualitative and computational findings to create a comprehensive strategy for a technology-based application that addresses the identified needs. This overall approach not only strengthens the basis for more informed healthcare technologies but also supports the LHS principle of continuous, evidence-based improvement.
The findings highlight the need for enhanced mental health support and personalized care plans, specifically focusing on the increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in individuals with ASD. The combined research findings further inform a concept and wireframe prototype for a digital safety plan application that addresses mental health safety and provides customized resources, aiming to improve access to necessary services for high-needs children and ASD. By integrating diverse research outputs, design and functionality of targeted technological solutions can be improved, leading to more effective and personalized health interventions.
The components of this dissertation introduce a nested framework within the larger LHS paradigm for knowledge discovery in healthcare, emphasizing the bridge of qualitative insights and computational findings. The proposed Bridge to Discovery in Learning Health Systems (BD- LHS) framework showcases an integrated approach, leveraging the combination of stakeholder insights and computational data analysis to drive evidence-based interventions. This holistic approach aims to generate a responsive, adaptive healthcare system that meets community needs and sets a new standard for interdisciplinary collaboration in health informatics, fostering continuous improvement in health outcomes.
Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series
Social & Cognitive Science Brown Bag Seminar Series
Friday, March 22nd, 2024
2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m., Dome Room (Metcalf 305)
Speaker: Hannah Snyder, Brandeis University
Title: Cognitive risk mechanisms for depression and anxiety in adolescence and emerging adulthood
Abstract: Adolescence and emerging adulthood is a key risk period for depression and anxiety, potentially in part because still-developing executive function is not adequate to fully cope with new roles and demands, increasing stress. I will discuss two lines of research which seek to better understand these risk factors. The first tests a risk pathway linking poor executive function to psychopathology via stress generation and repetitive negative thinking. The second further probes links between stress and psychopathology risk, focusing on the role of stressor controllability appraisals. Finally, I’ll briefly highlight our ongoing research (a) testing how risk factors interact to predict depression and anxiety symptom trajectories during the transition to college, and (b) testing a classroom intervention aimed at reducing academic stress.
If you are interested in having lunch with Dr. Snyder and/or meeting with her one-on-one, please sign up here: https://shorturl.at/yCFT9
CAAS Rounds presents: Dr. Jody Rich - Addressing the Opioid and Overdose Crisis
Abstract: Healthcare faces numerous ongoing challenges with substantial disparities in access to care and health outcomes, while an aging population and increased prevalence of chronic conditions place further strain on healthcare systems. Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize medicine and transform healthcare delivery. However, several diverse challenges are impeding routine and widespread adoption. In this talk, I will outline these challenges and present recent advances in machine learning that can help overcome them. First, I will present an automated machine learning approach that addresses technical challenges in developing, understanding, and deploying ML systems that currently render them largely inaccessible for medical practitioners. I will describe applications of this methodology to develop powerful prognostic models in cancer and cardiovascular disease that can inform clinical decision-making. Second, I will explore how machine learning can drive scientific discovery with advances in feature selection, explainable AI, and causal reasoning. Finally, I will explain how these approaches form part of a broader vision for machine learning in healthcare.
The workshop will discuss how you can utilize LinkedIn to market yourself, make connection with professionals, and increase the chances of finding jobs.
Title: Regulation of astrocyte reactivity and affective behaviors by astrocyte calcium signaling
Host: Dr. Elena Oancea
Dani Bassett, Ph.D. | J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania
In this talk, I will describe a notion of network cognition that manifests in how we engage with the curious world around us. To do so, I will draw together three lines of inquiry in mind, brain, and computation. I’ll begin with a line of inquiry into connective curiosity (“How do we connect bits of information as we walk about the world?”), then move into graph learning (“How do we build larger network models from those connections?”), and finally end in network control theory (“How is that model building constrained by the brain’s own connective structure?”). The studies discussed will span experiment, model, and theory, and bridge human behavior, neural representations, and computational science. Together they frame a formal investigation into network cognition and motivate future inquiry.
Speaker: Wayne Mackey (Statespace/Aimlabs)
Title: Entrepreneurship and Science in the Wild
Abstract: How different is it, really, to do research in academia vs industry? Why would one choose one over the other? What if you want to commercialize your academic research? In this talk I will share experiences, challenges, and insights on my journey from industry to academia to entrepreneurship - and possibly back to academia again. I’ll discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of founding my startup, Statespace, at the intersection of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and video games. I’ll introduce our video game platform (Aimlabs) that acts both as our core product and our primary research tool, as well as how we are opening it up to researchers at scale to more easily allow academic researchers to conduct engaging experiments “in the wild”.
Anne Collins, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley
Reinforcement learning frameworks have contributed tremendously to our better understanding of learning processes in brain and behavior. However, this remarkable success obscures the reality of multiple underlying processes that support humans’ unique flexibility and adaptability. In this talk, I will show that not accounting for such underlying processes in computational cognitive modeling weakens the generalizability and interpretability of findings, with important consequences in neuroscience, developmental, clinical research. I will present multiple approaches to disentangle the multiple processes that support flexible learning, including episodic and working memory processes. This works highlights the importance of studying learning as a multi-dimensional phenomenon that relies on multiple separable but inter-dependent computational mechanisms. Insights from how the brain implements learning is essential to informing generalizable, interpretable cognitive modeling.
DSCoV (Data Science, Computation, and Visualization) workshops are lunchtime introductions to basic data science and programming skills and tools, offered by and for Brown staff, faculty, and students (with occasional presenters from outside Brown). The workshops are interactive, so bring a laptop. All are welcome, and pizza is usually served.
Presenter: Albert Larson, Research Associate in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, EEPS
Holistic Water Cycle Analysis via the Confluence of Climate Model, Satellite, Ground Truth, and Machine Learning Signal Processing Technologies.
The workshops can also be attended on Zoom.
Leo Kozachkov, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Associate, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
The brain’s ability to perform challenging tasks is facilitated by its many inductive biases—hardwired biological features that predispose it to process information in certain ways over others. These features include anatomically distinct brain areas, as well as specialized cell types such as neurons and glia. Inductive biases grant the brain computational powers that currently surpass artificial intelligence systems in many domains. In this seminar, I will cover two recent avenues of research that leverage the brain’s inductive biases to build highly performant, recurrent artificial networks.
In the first half of my talk, I will discuss recent progress in understanding the computational role of different cell types. I will focus on neuron-glial interactions. An intriguing fact is that most human brain cells are not neurons, but rather glia. There is mounting experimental evidence suggesting that astrocytes, a specialized type of glial cell, play a significant role in learning, memory, and behavior. However, our theoretical understanding is lagging far behind. I will cover recent work that aims to bridge this gap by relating dynamical, energy-based neuron-astrocyte networks to powerful AI models such as Modern Hopfield Networks and transformers.
In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how and why the brain maintains a balance between flexibility and stability through “dynamic attractors”, which are reproducible patterns of neural activity in response to (potentially time-varying) stimuli. This work reveals an unexpected and useful theoretical link between dynamic attractors and modularity. Specifically, recurrent neural networks with dynamic attractors can be combined into large, modular “networks of networks”, reminiscent of the brain’s macroscopic organization, in ways that provably preserve stability. These higher-order, stable networks can then be optimized for state-of-the-art performance on benchmark sequential processing tasks, demonstrating that dynamic stability is a useful inductive bias for building brain-like performant recurrent models.
Speaker: Konrad Kording, University of Pennsylvania
Title: Causality in neuroscience: why we want it? How to get it?
Abstract: As scientists, we often ask how something works. What we usually mean with that is that we want to know how one aspect of the world (say, one neuron) affects another aspect of the world (say, another neuron). I will give an intuition of the relevant problems and approaches. Focusing on quasi-experimental approaches and machine learning, I will give an overview of how to broaden the scope of meaningful causal techniques in neuroscience and beyond.
CAAS Rounds presents: Dr. Kasey Creswell - How Social Context Shapes Alcohol Use Disorder Risk
Brown University’s Fluid Biomarkers Laboratory & Quanterix invite you to join us for a lunch and learn to take a look at:
Biomarker detection using the Ultra-sensitive Quanterix Simoa Technology
Lab tour to follow
Hybrid Option Available. RSVP Required
Title: Touch, Pain, and Body Schema
Host: Dr. Alexander Fleischmann
The Advance RI-CTR Clinical and Translational Research Seminar Series showcases clinical and translational research from across Rhode Island. This series features outstanding science from expert investigators alternating with Advance RI-CTR Pilot Projects awardees sharing their early research. Seminars are held virtually on the second Thursday of each month.
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Josiah Rich, MD, MPH: “The Opioid and Overdose Crisis in Rhode Island and Beyond: An Update”
At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, 50,000 Americans died in a single year. For two years in a row now, over 100,000 Americans have died each year from overdose. If not for the COVID pandemic, this would be the worst health crisis in the US in a century. This talk will review research strategies to address the opioid and overdose crisis.
About the Speaker
Josiah D. Rich, MD, MPH is professor of medicine and epidemiology at Brown University and attending physician at The Miriam and Rhode Island Hospitals. He is a clinical researcher with over 25 years of continuous federal research funding and a board certified infectious disease and addiction specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. He is a consultant to the Rhode Island Department of Corrections where he has provided weekly clinical care since 1994. He has testified in the US Congress, is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, has presented at conferences across the country and has authored over 250 peer reviewed publications in academic journals.
He earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia college, his medical degree from the University of Massachusetts and a master’s degree in public health from Harvard University. He completed his internship and residency at Emory University Affiliated Hospitals, and fellowship in infectious diseases at the Harvard combined program.
Leenoy Meshulam Ph.D.
Swartz Theory Fellow, University of Washington
For an animal to perform any function, millions of neurons in its nervous system furiously interact with each other. Be it a simple computation or a complex behavior, all biological functions involve many individual units. A theory of function must specify how to bridge different levels of description at different scales. For example, to predict the weather, it is irrelevant to follow the velocities of every molecule of air. Instead, we use coarser quantities of aggregated motion of many molecules, e.g., pressure fields. Statistical physics provides us with a theoretical framework to specify principled methods to systematically ‘move’ between descriptions of microscale quantities (air molecules) to macroscale ones (pressure fields). Can we hypothesize equivalent frameworks in the nervous system? How can we use descriptions at the level of neurons and synapses to make precise predictions of activity and behavior? My research group will develop theory, modeling, and machine learning tools to discover generalizable forms of scale bridging across species and behavioral functions. In this talk, I will present lines of previous, ongoing, and proposed research that highlight the potential of this vision. I shall focus on two seemingly very different systems: mouse brain neural activity patterns, and octopus skin cells activity patterns. In the mouse, we reveal striking scaling behavior and hallmarks of a renormalization group- like fixed point governing the system. In the octopus, camouflage skin pattern activity is reliably confined to a (quasi-) defined dynamical space. Finally, I will touch upon the benefits of comparing across animals to extract principles of multiscale function in the nervous system, and propose future directions to investigate how macroscale properties, such as memory or camouflage, emerge from microscale level activity of individual cells.
Title: Neurodevelopmental role of a tRNA methyltransferase linked to intellectual disability
Advisor: Dr. Kate O’Connor-Giles
BioCON is excited to be hosting Dr. Melissa Simon, Director of Business Development at Brown Technology Innovations. Dr. Simon works at Brown University’s Tech Transfer Office and has over 15 years of experience in biotechnology research, development, and commercialization. She will be discussing her experience working in consulting as well as opportunities available for students at Brown Technology Innovations. This event will be catered by Poke Works!
Jie Liu, Ph.D.; Assistant Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan
Our knowledge regarding the human genome has been exponentially increasing. The knowledge presents in different formats, including direct measurements of genomic entities with the ever-evolving biotechnologies, annotations by groups of experts from different consortia, discoveries from individual studies published as free text in biomedical literature, and insights learned from computational models trained on large-scale genomic datasets. However, we currently do not have an infrastructure to consolidate these heterogeneous knowledge sources. As a result, genomic researchers nowadays spend increasingly more time searching for relevant datasets and literature for scientific discoveries, annotations and conclusions, and unfortunately they do not have AI-powered tools to navigate existing knowledge and prioritize their hypotheses and research activities. In this talk, I will describe two computational infrastructures from my lab for consolidating our knowledge regarding the human genome. The first one is a genomic knowledge graph — GenomicKB, which consolidates 347 million genomic entities, 1.36 billion relations, and 3.9 billion entity and relation properties from over 30 consortia. The second one is a generalizable framework to comprehensively predict epigenome, chromatin organization, and transcriptome. Our works not only have an enormous positive impact on sharing genomic knowledge and facilitating new genomic knowledge discovery, they would also help to promote open science, inclusivity and fairness in the areas of computational genomics and data science.
Mental Health of Children and Families in Humanitarian Settings
Suzan Song, MD, MPH, PhD
Director, Global Child & Family Mental Health
Boston Children’s Hospital
Visiting Professor, Harvard Medical School
Professor of Psychiatry
George Washington University
Wednesday, March 13, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to identify and become familiar with the following concepts:
• Identify common mental health issues affecting children and families in humanitarian settings
• Describe multi-disciplinary responses to meeting the mental health needs of these youth
• Evaluate strategies and interventions for assessing and working with youth and families in humanitarian settings
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Song, reports the following financial relationships: Royalties: Penguin Random House
This workshop is geared toward PhD students and Postdocs who are seeking non-faculty jobs.
It will discuss:
Speaker: Maddie Pelgrim, Brown University
Title:
Abstract:
Jenelle Feather, Ph.D.
Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Neuroscience
The environment is full of rich sensory information. Our brain can parse this input, understand a scene, and learn from the resulting representations. The past decade has given rise to computational models that transform sensory inputs into representations useful for complex behaviors such as speech recognition or image classification. These models can improve our understanding of biological sensory systems and may provide a test bed for technology that aids sensory impairments, provided that model representations resemble those in the brain. In this talk, I will discuss my research program, which aims to develop methods to compare model representations with those of biological systems and to use insights from these methods to better understand perception and cognition. I will cover experiments in both the auditory and visual domains that bridge between neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning. By investigating the similarities and differences between computational model representations and those present in biological systems, we can use these insights to improve current computational models and better explain how our brain utilizes robust representations for perception and cognition.
MCB Graduate Student Ph.D. Dissertation Defense: Brendan McCarthy-Sinclair
Advisor: Judy Liu, PhD
Dissertation: The role of Doublecortin-like kinase 1 (DCLK1) in epilepsy progression.
This thesis presentation is open to all persons; MCB graduate students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.
Please contact Anna Sophia Boyd for zoom link
Please join us for the CADRE sponsored Distinguished Visiting Scholar Series (DVSS) with Dr. Julie Poehlmann from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Poehlmann is a highly recognized child clinical psychologist specializing in children with incarcerated parents. Her research focuses on promoting social justice for young children and families by understanding and fostering resilience processes while mitigating risks and trauma exposure. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, she investigates the intergenerational transmission of risk, trauma, resilience, and healing, particularly in high-risk infants and young children. She has designed and evaluated interventions, including interdisciplinary approaches for the criminal justice system and contemplative practices to enhance well-being. Currently, Dr. Poehlmann is engaged in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD) and the Enhanced Visits Program for children with incarcerated parents.
Dr. Ayed Allawzi
Senior Scientist in Pharmacology at Pioneering Medicine
BioCON and SACNAS are excited to welcome our second speaker Dr. Ayed Allawzi, who will be joining us in person at Brown University! Dr. Allawzi is a Senior Scientist in Pharmacology at Pioneering Medicine, within the Flagship Pioneering ecosystem. Dr. Allawzi is a Brown alumnus and graduated with his Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology and will be discussing his current role at Pioneering Medicine and the trajectory he took to secure his position following his Ph.D. at Brown. Additionally, Dr. Allawzi will be discussing strategies to identify careers outside of academia and how underrepresented students throughout science can make the leap into a career within the biotechnology space.
Please RSVP here: https://forms.gle/dmVLhhzo15sJSo1A7
Zoom link for remote participants: https://brown.zoom.us/j/99767702373
(Meeting ID: 997 6770 2373)
Title: The Role of Neuronal Activity in Glial Development, Circuitry, and Myelination
Host: Dr. Sonya Mayoral
Taylor Webb, Ph.D.
Human cognition is characterized by a remarkable ability to transcend the specifics of limited experience to entertain highly general, abstract ideas. Efforts to explain this capacity have long fueled debates between proponents of symbol systems and statistical approaches. In this talk, I will present an approach that suggests a novel reconciliation to this long-standing debate, by exploiting an inductive bias that I term the relational bottleneck. This approach imbues neural networks with key properties of traditional symbol systems, thereby enabling the data-efficient acquisition of cognitive abstractions, without the need for pre-specified symbolic representations. I will also discuss studies of perceptual decision confidence that illustrate the need to ground cognitive theories in the statistics of real-world data, and present evidence for the presence of emergent reasoning capabilities in large-scale deep neural networks (albeit requiring far more training data than is developmentally plausible). Finally, I will discuss the relationship of the relational bottleneck to other inductive biases, such as object-centric visual processing, and consider the potential mechanisms through which this approach may be implemented in the human brain.
Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series
Perception & Action Seminar
Thursday, March 7, 2024
12 noon - 1 p.m., Dome Room (Metcalf 305)
Speaker: Nora Newcombe
Title: Mental Rotation: Development, Assessment and Real-World Relevance
Abstract: Humans manipulate objects physically, starting in early infancy, and they also perform such manipulations mentally. How do such abilities develop, why are there individual differences, can we assess variability, and what consequences does variability have? This talk will discuss these questions focusing on the best studied skill, mental rotation, and its consequences for mathematical and scientific reasoning.
This program will teach you how to explore your career options.
By the end of the workshop, you will learn:
Sleep Health Disparities in Children and Adolescents: A Way Forward
Judith Owens, MD, MPH
Boston Children’s Hospital
Professor of Neurology
Harvard Medical School;
Wednesday, March 6, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Describe the B-SATED model of pediatric sleep health
• List three sleep parameters and/or disorders impacted by sleep health disparities in children from socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically marginalized groups
• Give examples of a) a focus on education and awareness, b) a research goal, and c) a targeted public health policy with the potential to reduce sleep health disparities
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Owens reports the following financial relationships: Consultant- ApniMed;
Data Safety Monitoring Board member- Idorsia Pharmaceuticals; and Scientific Advisory Board member -Sleep Number
DSCoV (Data Science, Computation, and Visualization) workshops are lunchtime introductions to basic data science and programming skills and tools, offered by and for Brown staff, faculty, and students (with occasional presenters from outside Brown). The workshops are interactive, so bring a laptop. All are welcome, and pizza is usually served.
Presenter: Paul Stey, Assistant CIO, Research Software Engineering and Data Science, OIT
This workshop is intended to serve as an introduction to the Rust programming language. It will cover the basic variable types, functions, control flow, ownership, the type system, and generics. We will assume no prior knowledge of Rust.
The workshops can also be attended on Zoom.
Is your lab developing the next great innovation to solve an unmet need? Are you curious about how to create a start-up? Brown Technology Innovations, Advance RI-CTR and the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship present Faculty Entrepreneur Connect, a new group designed to allow faculty inventors to meet and network with other entrepreneurially-minded faculty at Brown. If you have started a company, are thinking about starting a company, or just want to learn about entrepreneurship at Brown, we encourage you to attend!
Friday, March 1, 2024, 10AM
Danny Warshay, MBA: “The See Solve Scale Entrepreneurial Process”
Join Danny Warshay, Executive Director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice of Engineering at Brown University, and learn about the process covered in his popular ENGN1010 course and his book See-Solve-Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success.
Topics include the definition of entrepreneurship + the three steps of the structured entrepreneurial process;
Omar J. Ahmed, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience & Biomedical Engineering
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Gabriel Kreiman, Ph.D.
Professor, Harvard University, Children’s Hospital Boston
What information do neurons along the ventral visual cortex represent? Exhaustively examining all possible images is empirically impossible. Therefore, to investigate stimulus preferences, investigators have used a combination of intuitions derived from previous studies, natural stimulus statistics, and serendipitous findings. Here I will describe an approach to uncover what neurons want using a real-time, unbiased, systematic algorithm based on computational models of the ventral visual cortex. We use a generative deep neural network as a vast and diverse hypothesis space. A genetic algorithm searches this space for stimuli guided by neuron preferences. We show that this approach can rapidly generate synthetic images that trigger high activations, both in model units as well as in real neurons, in many cases even higher activations than those elicited by large numbers of hand-picked natural stimuli or images derived from conventional approaches. This approach forces us to revisit how we think about neural coding in the ventral visual cortex. I will also show the results of psychophysics experiments where humans are asked to describe the images that trigger high activation patterns in inferior temporal cortex neurons, reinforcing the notion that neurons in the ventral visual cortex represent complex visual features but not semantic categories. Finally, I will show that similar conclusions can be drawn by scrutinizing the representations in artificial neural networks as coarse approximations to the processing steps along the ventral stream.
Jonathan Viventi, Associate Professor in Duke University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, will present a talk entitled, “Flexibile electronics for neural interfaces.”
Right now, all of the tools that interface with our brains face a fundamental trade-off. We can either sample with low resolution, over large areas of the brain, or we can sample with fine resolution, over very small areas of the brain. This doesn’t fit with the way our brains are structured. With over 12 million neurons in each square cm of brain surface, we need to sample with high resolution over large areas in order to understand the way the brain works. The limitation is wiring. Every contact we put in the brain requires an individual wire and we can’t fit more than about 100 wires inside our heads. Using the same electronics that enable a digital camera to have millions of pixels without millions of wires, we can move some of the signal processing right to the sensors, allowing us to overcome the wiring bottleneck. The challenge is that traditional electronics are rigid and brittle. They are not compatible with the soft, curved surfaces of the brain. The solution is to make electronics that are flexible. Think of a piece of 2x4 lumber and a sheet of paper, they’re both made out of the same material, but have dramatically different physical properties. Leveraging that idea, we can make electronics that are extremely flexible, by making them very thin. Using these flexible electronics, we have developed high-density electrode arrays with thousands of electrodes that do not require thousands of external wires.
This technology has enabled extremely flexible arrays of 1,024 electrodes and soon, thousands of multiplexed and amplified sensors spaced as closely as 25 µm apart, which are connected using just a few wires. These devices yield an unprecedented level of spatial and temporal micro-electrocorticographic (µECoG) resolution for recording and stimulating distributed neural networks. I will present the development of this technology and data from in vivo recordings. I will also discuss how we are translating this technology for human clinical use.
Whether you want to work in academia or beyond, choosing a right postdoc could be a crucial step in shaping your future career. In this workshop, we will discuss some important factors that can easily be overlooked when you are planning to do a postdoc.
Speaker: Lena Luchkina, Harvard University
Title: Learning to talk about the absent, the abstract, and the unobservable
Abstract: How do we begin to learn about things we have never seen, such as people we have never met (‘Napoleon’), time that has not passed (‘tomorrow’), or ideas that have no stable perceptual form (’same’ vs. ‘different’ or ‘square root of negative one’)? To address this question, my research explores the development of a referential link between words and mental representations and the role of this link in shaping our ability to learn and reason about things we do not witness directly. I will first talk about my experimental investigations of young infants’ ability to create mental representations of something they have never seen and to connect such representations to words. I will then discuss learning mechanisms that enable this connection. Finally, I will talk about infants’ and young children’s ability to leverage this connection to make inferences about others’ knowledge based on language.
Speaker: Stefano Anzellotti, Boston College
Title: What drives the organization of social perception?
Abstract: The neural mechanisms that enable us to see faces, expressions, bodies and actions are organized into multiple distinct brain regions and subdivided into different processing streams. What drives this complex organization? Recent work has introduced unsupervised models driven by constraints at the level of the inputs, that successfully account for key aspects of the neural architecture of vision. However, other findings are difficult to reconcile with the view that the organization of social perception is exclusively driven by bottom-up constraints. As an alternative, constraints at the level of the outputs might play a central role. I will share the results from a series of studies that test predictions that derive from this alternative hypothesis, and discuss its potential to account for the architecture of social perception.
Title: From chromatin regulation to synapse development in autism and intellectual disability
Host: Dr. Sofia Lizarraga
Please join us for a seminar with Larry F. Abbott, Ph.D.
William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience and Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics (in Biological Sciences)
Principal Investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute
Co-director of Columbia’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science
Title: “Modeling the Navigational Circuitry of the Fly”
Abstract: Navigation requires orienting oneself relative to landmarks in the environment, evaluating relevant sensory data, remembering goals, and convert all this information into motor commands that direct locomotion. I will present models, highly constrained by connectomic, physiological and behavioral data, for how these functions are accomplished in the fly brain.
Speaker: Leyla Isik (Johns Hopkins University)
Title: The neural computations underlying human social interaction perception
Abstract: Humans perceive the world in rich social detail. We effortlessly recognize not only objects and people in our environment, but also social interactions between people. The ability to perceive and understand social interactions is critical for functioning in our social world, but despite its importance, the underlying neural computations remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will start by outlining a framework for studying social interaction perception as a computational vision problem. Then I will discuss new research using a largescale, naturalistic video dataset and condition-rich fMRI experiment to show that social interaction information is extracted hierarchically by the visual system, along the recently proposed lateral visual pathway. In the final part of my talk, I will discuss the computational implications of visual social interaction processing, and present a novel graph neural network model, SocialGNN, that instantiates these insights. SocialGNN reproduces human social interaction judgements in both controlled and natural videos using only visual information, without any explicit model of agents’ minds or the physical world, but requires relational, graph structure and processing to do so. Together, this work suggests that social interaction recognition is a core human ability that relies on specialized, structured visual representations.
DSCoV (Data Science, Computation, and Visualization) workshops are lunchtime introductions to basic data science and programming skills and tools, offered by and for Brown staff, faculty, and students (with occasional presenters from outside Brown). The workshops are interactive, so bring a laptop. All are welcome, and pizza is usually served.
Presenter: Ellen Duong, Lead Research Software Engineer, OIT
Ever wanted to learn how to code, but found it daunting? In this session, we will be learning the basics of coding in Python. We’ll work on the beginnings of creating a game like Wordle, where players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. No experience necessary!
The workshops can also be attended on Zoom.
Jiho Shin, Research Scientist, Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, will present a talk, “Next-generation bioelectronics enabled by inorganic single-crystalline semiconductor membranes.”
Abstract: Inorganic single-crystalline semiconductors such as Si, GaN, and GaAs form the basis of essentially all modern electronic devices, including various implantable and wearable systems that directly interface with the human body for disease diagnosis and neuroengineering applications. However, the bulkiness, rigidity, and non-resorbable nature of conventional semiconductor materials have long been associated with various medical complications. In this talk, I will introduce emerging classes of bioelectronic systems that have addressed these limitations by employing single-crystalline semiconductor membranes that are peeled off from their epitaxial wafers through Layer Transfer techniques. The layer-transferred semiconductor devices are ultrathin, flexible, stackable, and/or bioresorbable and can thereby enable minimally invasive human-device interfaces. I will discuss mainly my research on bioresorbable implantable sensors, stackable optoelectronic-based neural interfaces, and flexible wearable devices.
Bio: Dr. Shin is currently a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has a broad research background in micro/nanofabrication, electronic/ optoelectronic/ photonic/MEMS devices, IV/III-V/III-N semiconductor materials, and implantable/wearable sensors. As a research scientist in the Jeehwan Kim group at MIT, he is leading projects in three-dimensional heterogeneous integration of single-crystalline III-V/III-N compound semiconductor membranes for brain-machine interface and display applications. Before joining MIT, he received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), respectively. During his Ph.D. study in John Rogers group at UIUC, he developed bioresorbable intracranial MEMS/optical/photonic sensors using single-crystalline silicon nanomembranes. He has published 21 peer-reviewed articles including 6 first-authored papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Nanotechnology, and Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Host: David Borton, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Engineering, Neurosurgery and Brain Science
Daphne Martschenko, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Her work advocates for and facilitates research efforts that promote the socially and ethically responsible conduct and communication of and public engagement with human genetics and genomics. She is currently co-writing a book (under contract with Princeton University Press) with Sam Trejo, a quantitative sociologist who uses genomic data in his research. The book, titled “The Acid We Inherit,” is an adversarial collaboration that delves into the debates and controversies surrounding research connecting DNA to social and behavioral outcomes.
Objectives: At the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to:
Analyze existing mechanisms and incentives for identifying the risks and benefits of scientific research
Identify the role of social responsibility and challenges to its practice
Describe how to elicit and engage public perspectives to produce socially and ethically informed decisions
ZOOM ONLY
Speaker :
Darius Ebrahimi-Fakhari, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Neurology
Director, Movement Disorders Program
Boston Children’s Hospital
Topic :
“Pediatric Movement Disorders – From Genes, to Circuits, to Clinical Care”
Objectives
Title: The development of walking: a spinal interneuron perspective
Host: Dr. Gregorio Valdez
Emotion dysregulation and mental health in autism
Carla A. Mazefsky, PhD
Nancy J. Minshew Endowed Chair in Autism Research and
Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Clinical and Translational Science,
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Wednesday, February 14, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to identify and become familiar with the following concepts:
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Mazefsky, has no financial relationships to disclose.
Speaker: Emily Finn, Dartmouth College
Title:
Abstract:
CAAS Rounds presents: Dr. Christy Capone - Psychedelics for AUD and Co-morbid PTSD