2013 McGovern Institute Retreat
Author: Julie Pryor
Compulsive no more
By activating a brain circuit that controls compulsive behavior, researchers in Ann Graybiel‘s lab have shown that they can block a compulsive behavior in mice — a result that could help researchers develop new treatments for diseases such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette’s syndrome. Read the story >>
Neville Hogan: 2013 McGovern Institute Symposium
The annual McGovern Institute symposium took place on May 8, 2013 and featured nine talks on the subject of motor control and the motor cortex. In this video, Neville Hogan of MIT presents his talk entitled, “Modular dynamics in motor control and neuro-rehabilitation.”
Emile Bruneau: Tweaking the Empathy Gap
Emile Bruneau, a postdoctoral associate in Rebecca Saxe’s lab at the McGovern Institute, is interested in the psychology of human conflict. He is working with Saxe to figure out why empathy — the ability to feel compassion for another person’s suffering — often fails between members of opposing conflict groups. Bruneau is also trying to locate patterns of brain activity that correlate with empathy, in hopes of eventually using such measures to determine how well people respond to reconciliation programs aimed at boosting empathy between groups in conflict.
Read more about Emile Bruneau’s work in the New York Times magazine.
Ann Graybiel Meets the President of the United States
President Barack Obama greets the 2012 U.S. Kavli Prize Laureates in the Oval Office, March 28, 2013.
MIT researchers join Obama for brain announcement
Four MIT neuroscientists were among those invited to the White House on Tuesday, April 2, when President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to understand the human brain.
Professors Ed Boyden, Emery Brown, Robert Desimone and Sebastian Seung were among a group of leading researchers who joined Obama for the announcement, along with Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and representatives of federal and private funders of neuroscience research.
In unveiling the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, Obama highlighted brain research as one of his administration’s “grand challenges” — ambitious yet achievable goals that demand new innovations and breakthroughs in science and technology.
A key goal of the BRAIN Initiative will be to accelerate the development of new technologies to visualize brain activity and to understand how this activity is linked to behavior and to brain disorders.
“There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked,” Obama said, “and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be — will be — transformative.”
To jump-start the initiative, the NIH, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Science Foundation will invest some $100 million in research support beginning in the next fiscal year. Planning will be overseen by a working group co-chaired by Cornelia Bargmann PhD ’87, now at Rockefeller University, and William Newsome of Stanford University. Brown, an MIT professor of computational neuroscience and of health sciences and technology, will serve as a member of the working group.
Boyden, the Benesse Career Development Associate Professor of Research in Engineering, has pioneered the development of new technologies for studying brain activity. Desimone, the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience, is director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, which conducts research in many areas relevant to the new initiative. Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience and physics, is a leader in the field of “connectomics,” the effort to describe the wiring diagram of the brain.
2013 Scolnick Prize Lecture: Thomas Jessell
Dr. Thomas Jessell of Columbia University is the winner of the 2013 Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience for his pioneering work on synaptic plasticity, the process by which the brain’s connections are modified in response to experience.
On April 1, 2013, he delivered the Scolnick Prize lecture, entitled “Sifting Circuits for Motor Control.”
Brain Scan Cover Image: Winter 2013
The cover of the Winter 2013 issue of Brain Scan features an artist’s representation of a new genome editing technique developed by Feng Zhang. The method allows researchers to disrupt or replace genes at will.
2013 Sharp Lecture in Neural Circuits: Karel Svoboda
On March 14, 2013, Dr. Karel Svoboda of HHMI delivered the second annual Sharp Lecture in Neuroscience. Dr. Svoboda’s lab is working on the structure, function and plasticity of neocortical circuits.
Martha Constantine-Paton to receive top honors from Tufts University
Martha Constantine-Paton will receive the Dean’s Medal from Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences for her “exceptional contributions to the field of developmental neuroscience.” Constantine-Paton, a Tufts alumna, refers to her time at the university as a “turning point” in her life and credits the school for giving her the self-confidence she needed to pursue a career in science. The Dean’s Medal is the highest honor available at each school at Tufts, reserved only “for those select individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the university and to the greater community.”
Constantine-Paton will be awarded the Dean’s Medal on March 25, 2013.