Author: Julie Pryor

Ann Graybiel wins 2018 Gruber Neuroscience Prize

Anne Trafton |

Institute Professor Ann Graybiel, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is being recognized by the Gruber Foundation for her work on the structure, organization, and function of the once-mysterious basal ganglia. She was awarded the prize alongside Okihide Hikosaka of the National Institute of Health’s National Eye Institute and Wolfram Schultz of the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

The basal ganglia have long been known to play a role in movement, and the work of Graybiel and others helped to extend their roles to cognition and emotion. Dysfunction in the basal ganglia has been linked to a host of disorders including Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and to depression and anxiety disorders. Graybiel’s research focuses on the circuits thought to underlie these disorders, and on how these circuits act to help us form habits in everyday life.

“We are delighted that Ann has been honored with the Gruber Neuroscience Prize,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute. “Ann’s work has truly elucidated the complexity and functional importance of these forebrain structures. Her work has driven the field forward in a fundamental fashion, and continues to do so.’

Graybiel’s research focuses broadly on the striatum, a hub in basal ganglia-based circuits that is linked to goal-directed actions and habits. Prior to her work, the striatum was considered to be a primitive forebrain region. Graybiel found that the striatum instead has a complex architecture consisting of specialized zones: striosomes and the surrounding matrix. Her group went on to relate these zones to function, finding that striosomes and matrix differentially influence behavior. Among other important findings, Graybiel has shown that striosomes are focal points in circuits that link mood-related cortical regions with the dopamine-containing neurons of the midbrain, which are implicated in learning and motivation and which undergo degeneration in Parkinson’s disorder and other clinical conditions. She and her group have shown that these regions are activated by drugs of abuse, and that they influence decision-making, including decisions that require weighing of costs and benefits.

Graybiel continues to drive the field forward, finding that striatal neurons spike in an accentuated fashion and ‘bookend’ the beginning and end of behavioral sequences in rodents and primates. This activity pattern suggests that the striatum demarcates useful behavioral sequences such, in the case of rodents, pressing levers or running down mazes to receive a reward. Additionally, she and her group worked on miniaturized tools for chemical sensing and delivery as part of a continued drive toward therapeutic intervention in collaboration with the laboratories of Robert Langer in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Michael Cima, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

“My first thought was of our lab, and how fortunate I am to work with such talented and wonderful people,” says Graybiel.  “I am deeply honored to be recognized by this prestigious award on behalf of our lab.”

The Gruber Foundation’s international prize program recognizes researchers in the areas of cosmology, neuroscience and genetics, and includes a cash award of $500,000 in each field. The medal given to award recipients also outlines the general mission of the foundation, “for the fundamental expansion of human knowledge,” and the prizes specifically honor those whose groundbreaking work fits into this paradigm.

Graybiel, a member of the MIT Class of 1971, has also previously been honored with the National Medal of Science, the Kavli Award, the James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award at MIT, Woman Leader of Parkinson’s Science award from the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and has been recognized by the National Parkinson Foundation for her contributions to the understanding and treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Graybiel is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Gruber Neuroscience Prize will be presented in a ceremony at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego this coming November.

Beyond the 30 Million Word Gap

Anne Trafton |

At the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, John Gabrieli’s lab is studying how exposure to language may influence brain function in children.

The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Anne Trafton |

Opening May 3, 2018

Santiago Ramón y Cajal made transformative discoveries of the anatomy of the brain and nervous system, work that led to his receiving a Nobel Prize in 1906. This founder of modern neuroscience was also an exceptional artist. His drawings of the brain were not only beautiful, but also astounding in their capacity to illustrate and understand the details of brain structure and function.

The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal at the MIT Museum is part of a traveling exhibit that will include approximately 80 of Cajal’s drawings, many rarely before seen in the U.S.

These historical works will be complimented by a contemporary exhibition of neuroscience visualizations that are leading to new insights, aided by technologies, many pioneered here at MIT’s McGovern Institute, that allow increasingly more detailed and precise understandings.

The exhibit is scheduled to open on May 3, 2018.

The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal was developed by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota with the CSIC’s Cajal Institute, Madrid, Spain.

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Major exhibition support provided by:

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Sustaining exhibition support provided by:

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Contributing exhibition support provided by:

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This exhibition is generously supported by the Associate Provost for the Arts, Philip Khoury. Additional support has been provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

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Warm Wishes for 2018!

Anne Trafton |

This year, we hope you enjoy “Postcards from the Brain” — an illustrative journey featuring brain regions studied by McGovern researchers.

For a closer look at these postcards, including a description of how our researchers are studying these particular regions of the brain, please visit our image gallery.

McGovern Institute 2017 Halloween Party

Anne Trafton |

See below for a full gallery of images from our annual Halloween party.

How Biological Memory Really Works: Insights from the Man with the World’s Greatest Memory

Anne Trafton |

 

Jim Karol exhibited no particular talent for memorizing anything early in his life. Far from being a savant, his grades in school were actually pretty bad and, after failing to graduate from college, he spent his 20’s working in a factory. He only started playing around with mnemonic techniques at the age of 49, merely as a means to amuse himself while he worked out on the treadmill. Then, in one of the most remarkable cognitive transformations in human history, he turned himself into the man with the world’s greatest memory. Whatever vast body of information is put before him — the US zip codes, the day of the week of every date in history, the first few thousand digits of pi, etc. — he voraciously commits to memory using his own inimitable mnemonic techniques. Moreover, unlike most other professional memorists, Jim has mastered the mental skill of permanently storing that information in long-term memory, as opposed to only short or medium-term memory. How does he do it?

To be sure, Jim has taken standard menmonic techniques to the next level. That said, it has been well-documented for over 2500 years that mnemonic techiques — such as the “Method of Loci” or the “Memory Palace” — dramatically enhance the memory capacity of anyone who uses them regularly. But is there any point to improving one’s memory in the age of the computer? Tony Dottino, the founder/executive director of the USA Memory Championship and a world reknown memory coach, will describe his experiences of teaching these techniques to all age groups.

Finally, does any of this have anything to do with the neuroscience of memory? McGovern Institute neuroscientist Robert Ajemian argues that it does and that one of the great intellectual misunderstandings in scientific history is that modern-day neuroscientists largely base their conceptualization of human memory on the computer metaphor. For this reason, neuroscientists usually talk of read/write operations, traces, engrams, storage/retrieval distinctions, etc. Ajemian argues that all of this is wrong for the brain, a highly distributed system which processes in parallel. The correct conceptualization of human memory is that of content-addressable memory implemented by attractor networks, and the success of mnemonic techniques, though largely ignored in current theories of memory, constitutes the ultimate proof. Ajemian will briefly outline these arguments.

Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research: Opening Remarks

Anne Trafton |

June 12, 2017
Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research: Opening Remarks
Bob Desimone, Director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Bob Millard, Chair of MIT Corporation
Lore Harp McGovern, Co-founder of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang, Founders of the Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research

On June 12, 2017, the McGovern Institute hosted the launch celebration for the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research. The center is made possible by a kick-off commitment of $20 million, made by Lisa Yang and MIT alumnus Hock Tan ’75.

The Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research will support research on the genetic, biological and neural bases of autism spectrum disorders, a developmental disability estimated to affect 1 in 68 individuals in the United States. Tan and Yang hope their initial investment will stimulate additional support and help foster collaborative research efforts to erase the devastating effects of this disorder on individuals, their families and the broader autism community.

Feng Zhang Wins the 2017 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists

Anne Trafton |

The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences today announced the 2017 Laureates of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. Starting with a pool of 308 nominees – the most promising scientific researchers aged 42 years and younger nominated by America’s top academic and research institutions – a distinguished jury first narrowed their selections to 30 Finalists, and then to three outstanding Laureates, one each from the disciplines of Life Sciences, Chemistry and Physical Sciences & Engineering. Each Laureate will receive $250,000 – the largest unrestricted award of its kind for early career scientists and engineers. This year’s Blavatnik National Laureates are:

Feng Zhang, PhD, Core Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, MIT; Robertson Investigator, New York Stem Cell Foundation; James and Patricia Poitras ’63 Professor in Neuroscience, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Dr. Zhang is being recognized for his role in developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system and demonstrating pioneering uses in mammalian cells, and for his development of revolutionary technologies in neuroscience.

Melanie S. Sanford, PhD, Moses Gomberg Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Chemistry, University of Michigan. Dr. Sanford is being celebrated for developing simpler chemical approaches – with less environmental impact – to the synthesis of molecules that have applications ranging from carbon dioxide recycling to drug discovery.

Yi Cui, PhD, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Photon Science and Chemistry, Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Dr. Cui is being honored for his technological innovations in the use of nanomaterials for environmental protection and the development of sustainable energy sources.

“The work of these three brilliant Laureates demonstrates the exceptional science being performed at America’s premiere research institutions and the discoveries that will make the lives of future generations immeasurably better,” said Len Blavatnik, Founder and Chairman of Access Industries, head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and an Academy Board Governor.

“Each of our 2017 National Laureates is shifting paradigms in areas that profoundly affect the way we tackle the health of our population and our planet — improved ways to store energy, “greener” drug and fuel production, and novel tools to correct disease-causing genetic mutations,” said Ellis Rubinstein, President and CEO of the Academy and Chair of the Awards’ Scientific Advisory Council. “Recognition programs like the Blavatnik Awards provide incentives and resources for rising stars, and help them to continue their important work. We look forward to learning where their innovations and future discoveries will take us in the years ahead.”

The annual Blavatnik Awards, established in 2007 by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, recognize exceptional young researchers who will drive the next generation of innovation by answering today’s most complex and intriguing scientific questions.

Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research: Feng Zhang

Anne Trafton |

June 12, 2017
Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research: Launch Celebration
Feng Zhang, McGovern Institute for Brain Research
“Gene Therapy for the Brain”