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National Academy of Sciences honors cognitive neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher

by Julie Pryor |

MIT neuroscientist and McGovern Investigator Nancy Kanwisher. Photo: Jussi Puikkonen/KNAW

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has announced today that Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has received the 2022 NAS Award in the Neurosciences for her “pioneering research into the functional organization of the human brain.” The $25,000 prize, established by the Fidia Research Foundation, is presented every three years to recognize “extraordinary contributions to the neuroscience fields.”

“I am deeply honored to receive this award from the NAS,” says Kanwisher, who is also an investigator in MIT’s McGovern Institute and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. “It has been a profound privilege, and a total blast, to watch the human brain in action as these data began to reveal an initial picture of the organization of the human mind. But the biggest joy has been the opportunity to work with the incredible group of talented young scientists who actually did the work that this award recognizes.”

A window into the mind

Kanwisher is best known for her landmark insights into how humans recognize and process faces. Psychology had long-suggested that recognizing a face might be distinct from general object recognition. But Kanwisher galvanized the field in 1997 with her seminal discovery that the human brain contains a small region specialized to respond only to faces. The region, which Kanwisher termed the fusiform face area (FFA), became activated when subjects viewed images of faces in an MRI scanner, but not when they looked at scrambled faces or control stimuli.

Since her 1997 discovery (now the most highly cited manuscript in its area), Kanwisher and her students have applied similar methods to find brain specializations for the recognition of scenes, the mental states of others, language, and music. Taken together, her research provides a compelling glimpse into the architecture of the brain, and, ultimately, what makes us human.

“Nancy’s work over the past two decades has argued that many aspects of human cognition are supported by specialized neural circuitry, a conclusion that stands in contrast to our subjective sense of a singular mental experience,” says McGovern Institute Director Robert Desimone. “She has made profound contributions to the psychological and cognitive sciences and I am delighted that the National Academy of Sciences has recognized her outstanding achievements.”

One-in-a-million mentor

Beyond the lab, Kanwisher has a reputation as a tireless communicator and mentor who is actively engaged in the policy implications of brain research. The statistics speak for themselves: her 2014 TED talk, “A Neural portrait of the human mind” has been viewed over a million times online and her introductory MIT OCW course on the human brain has generated more than nine million views on YouTube.

Nancy Kanwisher works with researchers from her lab in MIT’s Martinos Imaging Center. Photo: Kris Brewer

Kanwisher also has an exceptional track record in training women scientists who have gone on to successful independent research careers, in many cases becoming prominent figures in their own right.

“Nancy is the one-in-a-million mentor, who is always skeptical of your ideas and your arguments, but immensely confident of your worth,” says Rebecca Saxe, John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, investigator at the McGovern Institute, and associate dean of MIT’s School of Science. Saxe was a graduate student in Kanwisher’s lab where she earned her PhD in cognitive neuroscience in 2003. “She has such authentic curiosity,” Saxe adds. “It’s infectious and sustaining. Working with Nancy was a constant reminder of why I wanted to be a scientist.”

The NAS will present Kanwisher with the award during its annual meeting on May 1, 2022 in Washington, DC. The event will be webcast live. Kanwisher plans to direct her prize funds to the non-profit organization Malengo, established by a former student and which provides quality undergraduate education to individuals who would otherwise not be able to afford it.

Babies can tell who has close relationships based on one clue: saliva

Anne Trafton |

Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them.

MIT neuroscientists have now identified a specific signal that young children and even babies use to determine whether two people have a strong relationship and a mutual obligation to help each other: whether those two people kiss, share food, or have other interactions that involve sharing saliva.

In a new study, the researchers showed that babies expect people who share saliva to come to one another’s aid when one person is in distress, much more so than when people share toys or interact in other ways that do not involve saliva exchange. The findings suggest that babies can use these cues to try to figure out who around them is most likely to offer help, the researchers say.

“Babies don’t know in advance which relationships are the close and morally obligating ones, so they have to have some way of learning this by looking at what happens around them,” says Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the new study.

MIT postdoc Ashley Thomas is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Science. Brandon Woo, a Harvard University graduate student; Daniel Nettle, a professor of behavioral science at Newcastle University; and Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard, are also authors of the paper.

Sharing saliva

In human societies, people typically distinguish between “thick” and “thin” relationships. Thick relationships, usually found between family members, feature strong levels of attachment, obligation, and mutual responsiveness. Anthropologists have also observed that people in thick relationships are more willing to share bodily fluids such as saliva.

“That inspired both the question of whether infants distinguish between those types of relationships, and whether saliva sharing might be a really good cue they could use to recognize them,” Thomas says.

To study those questions, the researchers observed toddlers (16.5 to 18.5 months) and babies (8.5 to 10 months) as they watched interactions between human actors and puppets. In the first set of experiments, a puppet shared an orange with one actor, then tossed a ball back and forth with a different actor.

After the children watched these initial interactions, the researchers observed the children’s reactions when the puppet showed distress while sitting between the two actors. Based on an earlier study of nonhuman primates, the researchers hypothesized that babies would look first at the person whom they expected to help. That study showed that when baby monkeys cry, other members of the troop look to the baby’s parents, as if expecting them to step in.

The MIT team found that the children were more likely to look toward the actor who had shared food with the puppet, not the one who had shared a toy, when the puppet was in distress.

In a second set of experiments, designed to focus more specifically on saliva, the actor either placed her finger in her mouth and then into the mouth of the puppet, or placed her finger on her forehead and then onto the forehead of the puppet. Later, when the actor expressed distress while standing between the two puppets, children watching the video were more likely to look toward the puppet with whom she had shared saliva.

Social cues

The findings suggest that saliva sharing is likely an important cue that helps infants to learn about their own social relationships and those of people around them, the researchers say.

“The general skill of learning about social relationships is very useful,” Thomas says. “One reason why this distinction between thick and thin might be important for infants in particular, especially human infants, who depend on adults for longer than many other species, is that it might be a good way to figure out who else can provide the support that they depend on to survive.”

The researchers did their first set of studies shortly before Covid-19 lockdowns began, with babies who came to the lab with their families. Later experiments were done over Zoom. The results that the researchers saw were similar before and after the pandemic, confirming that pandemic-related hygiene concerns did not affect the outcome.

“We actually know the results would have been similar if it hadn’t been for the pandemic,” Saxe says. “You might wonder, did kids start to think very differently about sharing saliva when suddenly everybody was talking about hygiene all the time? So, for that question, it’s very useful that we had an initial data set collected before the pandemic.”

Doing the second set of studies on Zoom also allowed the researchers to recruit a much more diverse group of children because the subjects were not limited to families who could come to the lab in Cambridge during normal working hours.

In future work, the researchers hope to perform similar studies with infants in cultures that have different types of family structures. In adult subjects, they plan to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study what parts of the brain are involved in making saliva-based assessments about social relationships.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health; the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation; the Guggenheim Foundation; a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship; MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines; and the Siegel Foundation.

The craving state

by Jennifer Michalowski |

This story originally appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of BrainScan.

***

For people struggling with substance use disorders — and there are about 35 million of them worldwide — treatment options are limited. Even among those who seek help, relapse is common. In the United States, an epidemic of opioid addiction has been declared a public health emergency.

A 2019 survey found that 1.6 million people nationwide had an opioid use disorder, and the crisis has surged since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdose between April 2020 and April 2021 — nearly 30 percent more overdose deaths than occurred during the same period the previous year.

In the United States, an epidemic of opioid addiction has been declared a public health emergency.

A deeper understanding of what addiction does to the brain and body is urgently needed to pave the way to interventions that reliably release affected individuals from its grip. At the McGovern Institute, researchers are turning their attention to addiction’s driving force: the deep, recurring craving that makes people prioritize drug use over all other wants and needs.

McGovern Institute co-founder, Lore Harp McGovern.

“When you are in that state, then it seems nothing else matters,” says McGovern Investigator Fan Wang. “At that moment, you can discard everything: your relationship, your house, your job, everything. You only want the drug.”

With a new addiction initiative catalyzed by generous gifts from Institute co-founder Lore Harp McGovern and others, McGovern scientists with diverse expertise have come together to begin clarifying the neurobiology that underlies the craving state. They plan to dissect the neural transformations associated with craving at every level — from the drug-induced chemical changes that alter neuronal connections and activity to how these modifications impact signaling brain-wide. Ultimately, the McGovern team hopes not just to understand the craving state, but to find a way to relieve it — for good.

“If we can understand the craving state and correct it, or at least relieve a little bit of the pressure,” explains Wang, who will help lead the addiction initiative, “then maybe we can at least give people a chance to use their top-down control to not take the drug.”

The craving cycle

For individuals suffering from substance use disorders, craving fuels a cyclical pattern of escalating drug use. Following the euphoria induced by a drug like heroin or cocaine, depression sets in, accompanied by a drug craving motivated by the desire to relieve that suffering. And as addiction progresses, the peaks and valleys of this cycle dip lower: the pleasant feelings evoked by the drug become weaker, while the negative effects a person experiences in its absence worsen. The craving remains, and increasing use of the drug are required to relieve it.

By the time addiction sets in, the brain has been altered in ways that go beyond a drug’s immediate effects on neural signaling.

These insidious changes leave individuals susceptible to craving — and the vulnerable state endures. Long after the physical effects of withdrawal have subsided, people with substance use disorders can find their craving returns, triggered by exposure to a small amount of the drug, physical or social cues associated with previous drug use, or stress. So researchers will need to determine not only how different parts of the brain interact with one another during craving and how individual cells and the molecules within them are affected by the craving state — but also how things change as addiction develops and progresses.

Circuits, chemistry and connectivity

One clear starting point is the circuitry the brain uses to control motivation. Thanks in part to decades of research in the lab of McGovern Investigator Ann Graybiel, neuroscientists know a great deal about how these circuits learn which actions lead to pleasure and which lead to pain, and how they use that information to establish habits and evaluate the costs and benefits of complex decisions.

Graybiel’s work has shown that drugs of abuse strongly activate dopamine-responsive neurons in a part of the brain called the striatum, whose signals promote habit formation. By increasing the amount of dopamine that neurons release, these drugs motivate users to prioritize repeated drug use over other kinds of rewards, and to choose the drug in spite of pain or other negative effects. Her group continues to investigate the naturally occurring molecules that control these circuits, as well as how they are hijacked by drugs of abuse.

Distribution of opioid receptors targeted by morphine (shown in blue) in two regions in the dorsal striatum and nucleus accumbens of the mouse brain. Image: Ann Graybiel

In Fan Wang’s lab, work investigating the neural circuits that mediate the perception of physical pain has led her team to question the role of emotional pain in craving. As they investigated the source of pain sensations in the brain, they identified neurons in an emotion-regulating center called the central amygdala that appear to suppress physical pain in animals. Now, Wang wants to know whether it might be possible to modulate neurons involved in emotional pain to ameliorate the negative state that provokes drug craving.

These animal studies will be key to identifying the cellular and molecular changes that set the brain up for recurring cravings. And as McGovern scientists begin to investigate what happens in the brains of rodents that have been trained to self-administer addictive drugs like fentanyl or cocaine, they expect to encounter tremendous complexity.

McGovern Associate Investigator Polina Anikeeva, whose lab has pioneered new technologies that will help the team investigate the full spectrum of changes that underlie craving, says it will be important to consider impacts on the brain’s chemistry, firing patterns, and connectivity. To that end, multifunctional research probes developed in her lab will be critical to monitoring and manipulating neural circuits in animal models.

Imaging technology developed by investigator Ed Boyden will also enable nanoscale protein visualization brain-wide. An important goal will be to identify a neural signature of the craving state. With such a signal, researchers can begin to explore how to shut off that craving — possibly by directly modulating neural signaling.

Targeted treatments

“One of the reasons to study craving is because it’s a natural treatment point,” says McGovern Associate Investigator Alan Jasanoff. “And the dominant kind of approaches that people in our team think about are approaches that relate to neural circuits — to the specific connections between brain regions and how those could be changed.” The hope, he explains, is that it might be possible to identify a brain region whose activity is disrupted during the craving state, then use clinical brain stimulation methods to restore normal signaling — within that region, as well as in other connected parts of the brain.

To identify the right targets for such a treatment, it will be crucial to understand how the biology uncovered in laboratory animals reflects what’s happens in people with substance use disorders. Functional imaging in John Gabrieli’s lab can help bridge the gap between clinical and animal research by revealing patterns of brain activity associated with the craving state in both humans and rodents. A new technique developed in Jasanoff’s lab makes it possible to focus on the activity between specific regions of an animal’s brain. “By doing that, we hope to build up integrated models of how information passes around the brain in craving states, and of course also in control states where we’re not experiencing craving,” he explains.

In delving into the biology of the craving state, McGovern scientists are embarking on largely unexplored territory — and they do so with both optimism and urgency. “It’s hard to not appreciate just the size of the problem, and just how devastating addiction is,” says Anikeeva. “At this point, it just seems almost irresponsible to not work on it, especially when we do have the tools and we are interested in the general brain regions that are important for that problem. I would say that there’s almost a civic duty.”

Perfecting pitch perception

by Jennifer Michalowski |

New research from MIT neuroscientists suggest that natural soundscapes have shaped our sense of hearing, optimizing it for the kinds of sounds we most often encounter.

Mark Saddler, graduate fellow of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center. Photo: Caitlin Cunningham

In a study reported December 14 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers led by McGovern Institute Associate Investigator Josh McDermott used computational modeling to explore factors that influence how humans hear pitch. Their model’s pitch perception closely resembled that of humans—but only when it was trained using music, voices, or other naturalistic sounds.

Humans’ ability to recognize pitch—essentially, the rate at which a sound repeats—gives melody to music and nuance to spoken language. Although this is arguably the best-studied aspect of human hearing, researchers are still debating which factors determine the properties of pitch perception, and why it is more acute for some types of sounds than others. McDermott, who is also an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator with the Center for Brains Minds and Machines (CBMM), is particularly interested in understanding how our nervous system perceives pitch because cochlear implants, which send electrical signals about sound to the brain in people with profound deafness, don’t replicate this aspect of human hearing very well.

“Cochlear implants can do a pretty good job of helping people understand speech, especially if they’re in a quiet environment. But they really don’t reproduce the percept of pitch very well,” says Mark Saddler, a CBMM graduate student who co-led the project and an inaugural graduate fellow of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center. “One of the reasons it’s important to understand the detailed basis of pitch perception in people with normal hearing is to try to get better insights into how we would reproduce that artificially in a prosthesis.”

Artificial hearing

Pitch perception begins in the cochlea, the snail-shaped structure in the inner ear where vibrations from sounds are transformed into electrical signals and relayed to the brain via the auditory nerve. The cochlea’s structure and function help determine how and what we hear. And although it hasn’t been possible to test this idea experimentally, McDermott’s team suspected our “auditory diet” might shape our hearing as well.

To explore how both our ears and our environment influence pitch perception, McDermott, Saddler and research assistant Ray Gonzalez built a computer model called a deep neural network. Neural networks are a type of machine learning model widely used in automatic speech recognition and other artificial intelligence applications. Although the structure of an artificial neural network coarsely resembles the connectivity of neurons in the brain, the models used in engineering applications don’t actually hear the same way humans do—so the team developed a new model to reproduce human pitch perception. Their approach combined an artificial neural network with an existing model of the mammalian ear, uniting the power of machine learning with insights from biology. “These new machine learning models are really the first that can be trained to do complex auditory tasks and actually do them well, at human levels of performance,” Saddler explains.

The researchers trained the neural network to estimate pitch by asking it to identify the repetition rate of sounds in a training set. This gave them the flexibility to change the parameters under which pitch perception developed. They could manipulate the types of sound they presented to the model, as well as the properties of the ear that processed those sounds before passing them on to the neural network.

When the model was trained using sounds that are important to humans, like speech and music, it learned to estimate pitch much as humans do. “We very nicely replicated many characteristics of human perception…suggesting that it’s using similar cues from the sounds and the cochlear representation to do the task,” Saddler says.

But when the model was trained using more artificial sounds or in the absence of any background noise, its behavior was very different. For example, Saddler says, “If you optimize for this idealized world where there’s never any competing sources of noise, you can learn a pitch strategy that seems to be very different from that of humans, which suggests that perhaps the human pitch system was really optimized to deal with cases where sometimes noise is obscuring parts of the sound.”

The team also found the timing of nerve signals initiated in the cochlea to be critical to pitch perception. In a healthy cochlea, McDermott explains, nerve cells fire precisely in time with the sound vibrations that reach the inner ear. When the researchers skewed this relationship in their model, so that the timing of nerve signals was less tightly correlated to vibrations produced by incoming sounds, pitch perception deviated from normal human hearing. 

McDermott says it will be important to take this into account as researchers work to develop better cochlear implants. “It does very much suggest that for cochlear implants to produce normal pitch perception, there needs to be a way to reproduce the fine-grained timing information in the auditory nerve,” he says. “Right now, they don’t do that, and there are technical challenges to making that happen—but the modeling results really pretty clearly suggest that’s what you’ve got to do.”

MIT response to Wall Street Journal opinion essay

by Robert Desimone, McGovern Institute | Nergis Mavalvala, MIT School of Science | Maria T. Zuber, MIT Office of the Vice President for Research |

Following is an open statement in response to “Is MIT’s Research Helping the Chinese Military?”, an opinion essay by Michelle Bethel posted by the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 10, 2021. This statement is jointly from Prof. Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of MIT’s School of Science, and Prof. Maria T. Zuber, vice president for research at MIT.  

Ms. Bethel is absolutely right that research relationships with institutions in China require the most serious care and consideration. MIT brings a thorough and rigorous approach to these matters.

First let us be clear about the work of the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Of the dozens of research projects currently under way at the McGovern Institute, there is one active research collaboration with China. It involves better identifying and ultimately developing treatments for severe forms of autism or neurological disorders that often render individuals unable to speak and frequently require lifelong care. That project was thoroughly vetted and approved by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in 2019. MIT receives no funding from China for this research, and all findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals, meaning that they are open to medical researchers anywhere in the world. This is the collaboration with the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology that Ms. Bethel referenced in vague terms.

This does not eliminate general concerns about how research may be conducted or used, however. That’s why MIT has strong processes for evaluating and managing the risks of research involving countries, including China, whose behavior affects U.S. national and economic security. Every proposed engagement that involves an organization or funding source from China, once it has been evaluated for compliance with U.S. law and regulation, is further reviewed by committees of senior administrators to consider risks related to national security, economic competitiveness, and civil and human rights. Projects have been variously turned down, modified, or approved under this process.

Ms. Bethel raises important points with respect to U.S.-China relations – but not with respect to the work of the McGovern Institute. We regret that Ms. Bethel felt it necessary to step away from the McGovern, but we respect her views and continue in conversation with her. We note that two other members of the McGovern family, including the McGovern Institute’s co-founder and another daughter, continue to proudly serve on the McGovern board. We are grateful to all three family members.

MIT Future Founders Initiative announces prize competition to promote female entrepreneurs in biotech

Anne Trafton |

In a fitting sequel to its entrepreneurship “boot camp” educational lecture series last fall, the MIT Future Founders Initiative has announced the MIT Future Founders Prize Competition, supported by Northpond Ventures, and named the MIT faculty cohort that will participate in this year’s competition. The Future Founders Initiative was established in 2020 to promote female entrepreneurship in biotech.

Despite increasing representation at MIT, female science and engineering faculty found biotech startups at a disproportionately low rate compared with their male colleagues, according to research led by the initiative’s founders, MIT Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, MIT Professor and President Emerita Susan Hockfield, and MIT Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita Nancy Hopkins. In addition to highlighting systemic gender imbalances in the biotech pipeline, the initiative’s founders emphasize that the dearth of female biotech entrepreneurs represents lost opportunities for society as a whole — a bottleneck in the proliferation of publicly accessible medical and technological innovation.

“A very common myth is that representation of women in the pipeline is getting better with time … We can now look at the data … and simply say, ‘that’s not true’,” said Bhatia, who is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, in an interview for the March/April 2021 MIT Faculty Newsletter. “We need new solutions. This isn’t just about waiting and being optimistic.”

Inspired by generous funding from Northpond Labs, the research and development-focused affiliate of Northpond Ventures, and by the success of other MIT prize incentive competitions such as the Climate Tech and Energy Prize, the Future Founders Initiative Prize Competition will be structured as a learning cohort in which participants will be supported in commercializing their existing inventions with instruction in market assessments, fundraising, and business capitalization, as well as other programming. The program, which is being run as a partnership between the MIT School of Engineering and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, provides hands-on opportunities to learn from industry leaders about their experiences, ranging from licensing technology to creating early startup companies. Bhatia and Kit Hickey, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, are co-directors of the program.

“The competition is an extraordinary effort to increase the number of female faculty who translate their research and ideas into real-world applications through entrepreneurship,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “Our hope is that this likewise serves as an opportunity for participants to gain exposure and experience to the many ways in which they could achieve commercial impact through their research.”

At the end of the program, the cohort members will pitch their ideas to a selection committee composed of MIT faculty, biotech founders, and venture capitalists. The grand prize winner will receive $250,000 in discretionary funds, and two runners-up will receive $100,000. The winners will be announced at a showcase event, at which the entire cohort will present their work. All participants will also receive a $10,000 stipend for participating in the competition.

“The biggest payoff is not identifying the winner of the competition,” says Bhatia. “Really, what we are doing is creating a cohort … and then, at the end, we want to create a lot of visibility for these women and make them ‘top of mind’ in the community.”

The Selection Committee members for the MIT Future Founders Prize Competition are:

  • Bill Aulet, professor of the practice in the MIT Sloan School of Management and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
  • Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science; and founder of Hepregen, Glympse Bio, and Satellite Bio
  • Kit Hickey, senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center
  • Susan Hockfield, MIT president emerita and professor of neuroscience
  • Andrea Jackson, director at Northpond Ventures
  • Harvey Lodish, professor of biology and biomedical engineering at MIT and founder of Genzyme, Millennium, and Rubius
  • Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation and inclusion in the MIT Sloan School of Management; the William Porter Professor of Entrepreneurship; co-director of the MIT Innovation Initiative; and faculty director of the MIT Legatum Center
  • Amy Schulman, founding CEO of Lyndra Therapeutics and partner at Polaris Partners
  • Nandita Shangari, managing director at Novartis Venture Fund

“As an investment firm dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs, we are acutely aware of the limited number of companies founded and led by women in academia. We believe humanity should be benefiting from brilliant ideas and scientific breakthroughs from women in science, which could address many of the world’s most pressing problems. Together with MIT, we are providing an opportunity for women faculty members to enhance their visibility and gain access to the venture capital ecosystem,” says Andrea Jackson, director at Northpond Ventures.

“This first cohort is representative of the unrealized opportunity this program is designed to capture. While it will take a while to build a robust community of connections and role models, I am pleased and confident this program will make entrepreneurship more accessible and inclusive to our community, which will greatly benefit society,” says Susan Hockfield, MIT president emerita.

The MIT Future Founders Prize Competition cohort members were selected from schools across MIT, including the School of Science, the School of Engineering, and Media Lab within the School of Architecture and Planning. They are:

Polina Anikeeva is professor of materials science and engineering and brain and cognitive sciences, an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. She is particularly interested in advancing the possibility of future neuroprosthetics, through biologically-informed materials synthesis, modeling, and device fabrication. Anikeeva earned her BS in biophysics from St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University and her PhD in materials science and engineering from MIT.

Natalie Artzi is principal research scientist in the Institute of Medical Engineering and Science and an assistant professor in the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Through the development of smart materials and medical devices, her research seeks to “personalize” medical interventions based on the specific presentation of diseased tissue in a given patient. She earned both her BS and PhD in chemical engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Laurie A. Boyer is professor of biology and biological engineering in the Department of Biology. By studying how diverse molecular programs cross-talk to regulate the developing heart, she seeks to develop new therapies that can help repair cardiac tissue. She earned her BS in biomedical science from Framingham State University and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Tal Cohen is associate professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. She wields her understanding of how materials behave when they are pushed to their extremes to tackle engineering challenges in medicine and industry. She earned her BS, MS, and PhD in aerospace engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Canan Dagdeviren is assistant professor of media arts and sciences and the LG Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. Her research focus is on creating new sensing, energy harvesting, and actuation devices that can be stretched, wrapped, folded, twisted, and implanted onto the human body while maintaining optimal performance. She earned her BS in physics engineering from Hacettepe University, her MS in materials science and engineering from Sabanci University, and her PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ariel Furst is the Raymond (1921) & Helen St. Laurent Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Her research addresses challenges in global health and sustainability, utilizing electrochemical methods and biomaterials engineering. She is particularly interested in new technologies that detect and treat disease. Furst earned her BS in chemistry at the University of Chicago and her PhD at Caltech.

Kristin Knouse is assistant professor in the Department of Biology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. She develops tools to investigate the molecular regulation of organ injury and regeneration directly within a living organism with the goal of uncovering novel therapeutic avenues for diverse diseases. She earned her BS in biology from Duke University, her PhD and MD through the Harvard and MIT MD-PhD program.

Elly Nedivi is the William R. (1964) & Linda R. Young Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory with joint appointments in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biology. Through her research of neurons, genes, and proteins, Nedivi focuses on elucidating the cellular mechanisms that control plasticity in both the developing and adult brain. She earned her BS in biology from Hebrew University and her PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University.

Ellen Roche is associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science, and the W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering. Borrowing principles and design forms she observes in nature, Roche works to develop implantable therapeutic devices that assist cardiac and other biological function. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the National University of Ireland at Galway, her MS in bioengineering from Trinity College Dublin, and her PhD from Harvard University.

A key brain region responds to faces similarly in infants and adults

Anne Trafton |

Within the visual cortex of the adult brain, a small region is specialized to respond to faces, while nearby regions show strong preferences for bodies or for scenes such as landscapes.

Neuroscientists have long hypothesized that it takes many years of visual experience for these areas to develop in children. However, a new MIT study suggests that these regions form much earlier than previously thought. In a study of babies ranging in age from two to nine months, the researchers identified areas of the infant visual cortex that already show strong preferences for either faces, bodies, or scenes, just as they do in adults.

“These data push our picture of development, making babies’ brains look more similar to adults, in more ways, and earlier than we thought,” says Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the new study.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers collected usable data from more than 50 infants, a far greater number than any research lab has been able to scan before. This allowed them to examine the infant visual cortex in a way that had not been possible until now.

“This is a result that’s going to make a lot of people have to really grapple with their understanding of the infant brain, the starting point of development, and development itself,” says Heather Kosakowski, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study, which appears today in Current Biology.

MIT graduate student Heather Kosakowski prepares an infant for an MRI scan at the Martinos Imaging Center. Photo: Caitlin Cunningham

Distinctive regions

More than 20 years ago, Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, used fMRI to discover the fusiform face area: a small region of the visual cortex that responds much more strongly to faces than any other kind of visual input.

Since then, Kanwisher and her colleagues have also identified parts of the visual cortex that respond to bodies (the extrastriate body area, or EBA), and scenes (the parahippocampal place area, or PPA).

“There is this set of functionally very distinctive regions that are present in more or less the same place in pretty much every adult,” says Kanwisher, who is also a member of MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and an author of the new study. “That raises all these questions about how these regions develop. How do they get there, and how do you build a brain that has such similar structure in each person?”

One way to try to answer those questions is to investigate when these highly selective regions first develop in the brain. A longstanding hypothesis is that it takes several years of visual experience for these regions to gradually become selective for their specific targets. Scientists who study the visual cortex have found similar selectivity patterns in children as young as 4 or 5 years old, but there have been few studies of children younger than that.

In 2017, Saxe and one of her graduate students, Ben Deen, reported the first successful use of fMRI to study the brains of awake infants. That study, which included data from nine babies, suggested that while infants did have areas that respond to faces and scenes, those regions were not yet highly selective. For example, the fusiform face area did not show a strong preference for human faces over every other kind of input, including human bodies or the faces of other animals.

However, that study was limited by the small number of subjects, and also by its reliance on an fMRI coil that the researchers had developed especially for babies, which did not offer as high-resolution imaging as the coils used for adults.

For the new study, the researchers wanted to try to get better data, from more babies. They built a new scanner that is more comfortable for babies and also more powerful, with resolution similar to that of fMRI scanners used to study the adult brain.

After going into the specialized scanner, along with a parent, the babies watched videos that showed either faces, body parts such as kicking feet or waving hands, objects such as toys, or natural scenes such as mountains.

The researchers recruited nearly 90 babies for the study, collected usable fMRI data from 52, half of which contributed higher-resolution data collected using the new coil. Their analysis revealed that specific regions of the infant visual cortex show highly selective responses to faces, body parts, and natural scenes, in the same locations where those responses are seen in the adult brain. The selectivity for natural scenes, however, was not as strong as for faces or body parts.

The infant brain

The findings suggest that scientists’ conception of how the infant brain develops may need to be revised to accommodate the observation that these specialized regions start to resemble those of adults sooner than anyone had expected.

“The thing that is so exciting about these data is that they revolutionize the way we understand the infant brain,” Kosakowski says. “A lot of theories have grown up in the field of visual neuroscience to accommodate the view that you need years of development for these specialized regions to emerge. And what we’re saying is actually, no, you only really need a couple of months.”

Because their data on the area of the brain that responds to scenes was not as strong as for the other locations they looked at, the researchers now plan to pursue additional studies of that region, this time showing babies images on a much larger screen that will more closely mimic the experience of being within a scene. For that study, they plan to use near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a non-invasive imaging technique that doesn’t require the participant to be inside a scanner.

“That will let us ask whether young babies have robust responses to visual scenes that we underestimated in this study because of the visual constraints of the experimental setup in the scanner,” Saxe says.

The researchers are now further analyzing the data they gathered for this study in hopes of learning more about how development of the fusiform face area progresses from the youngest babies they studied to the oldest. They also hope to perform new experiments examining other aspects of cognition, including how babies’ brains respond to language and music.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the McGovern Institute, and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

Study finds a striking difference between neurons of humans and other mammals

Anne Trafton |

McGovern Institute Investigator Mark Harnett. Photo: Justin Knight

Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, which are produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions such as potassium and sodium. In a surprising new finding, MIT neuroscientists have shown that human neurons have a much smaller number of these channels than expected, compared to the neurons of other mammals.

The researchers hypothesize that this reduction in channel density may have helped the human brain evolve to operate more efficiently, allowing it to divert resources to other energy-intensive processes that are required to perform complex cognitive tasks.

“If the brain can save energy by reducing the density of ion channels, it can spend that energy on other neuronal or circuit processes,” says Mark Harnett, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

Harnett and his colleagues analyzed neurons from 10 different mammals, the most extensive electrophysiological study of its kind, and identified a “building plan” that holds true for every species they looked at — except for humans. They found that as the size of neurons increases, the density of channels found in the neurons also increases.

However, human neurons proved to be a striking exception to this rule.

“Previous comparative studies established that the human brain is built like other mammalian brains, so we were surprised to find strong evidence that human neurons are special,” says former MIT graduate student Lou Beaulieu-Laroche.

Beaulieu-Laroche is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature.

A building plan

Neurons in the mammalian brain can receive electrical signals from thousands of other cells, and that input determines whether or not they will fire an electrical impulse called an action potential. In 2018, Harnett and Beaulieu-Laroche discovered that human and rat neurons differ in some of their electrical properties, primarily in parts of the neuron called dendrites — tree-like antennas that receive and process input from other cells.

One of the findings from that study was that human neurons had a lower density of ion channels than neurons in the rat brain. The researchers were surprised by this observation, as ion channel density was generally assumed to be constant across species. In their new study, Harnett and Beaulieu-Laroche decided to compare neurons from several different mammalian species to see if they could find any patterns that governed the expression of ion channels. They studied two types of voltage-gated potassium channels and the HCN channel, which conducts both potassium and sodium, in layer 5 pyramidal neurons, a type of excitatory neurons found in the brain’s cortex.

 

Former McGovern Institute graduate student Lou Beaulieu-Laroche is the lead author of the 2021 Nature paper.

They were able to obtain brain tissue from 10 mammalian species: Etruscan shrews (one of the smallest known mammals), gerbils, mice, rats, Guinea pigs, ferrets, rabbits, marmosets, and macaques, as well as human tissue removed from patients with epilepsy during brain surgery. This variety allowed the researchers to cover a range of cortical thicknesses and neuron sizes across the mammalian kingdom.

The researchers found that in nearly every mammalian species they looked at, the density of ion channels increased as the size of the neurons went up. The one exception to this pattern was in human neurons, which had a much lower density of ion channels than expected.

The increase in channel density across species was surprising, Harnett says, because the more channels there are, the more energy is required to pump ions in and out of the cell. However, it started to make sense once the researchers began thinking about the number of channels in the overall volume of the cortex, he says.

In the tiny brain of the Etruscan shrew, which is packed with very small neurons, there are more neurons in a given volume of tissue than in the same volume of tissue from the rabbit brain, which has much larger neurons. But because the rabbit neurons have a higher density of ion channels, the density of channels in a given volume of tissue is the same in both species, or any of the nonhuman species the researchers analyzed.

“This building plan is consistent across nine different mammalian species,” Harnett says. “What it looks like the cortex is trying to do is keep the numbers of ion channels per unit volume the same across all the species. This means that for a given volume of cortex, the energetic cost is the same, at least for ion channels.”

Energy efficiency

The human brain represents a striking deviation from this building plan, however. Instead of increased density of ion channels, the researchers found a dramatic decrease in the expected density of ion channels for a given volume of brain tissue.

The researchers believe this lower density may have evolved as a way to expend less energy on pumping ions, which allows the brain to use that energy for something else, like creating more complicated synaptic connections between neurons or firing action potentials at a higher rate.

“We think that humans have evolved out of this building plan that was previously restricting the size of cortex, and they figured out a way to become more energetically efficient, so you spend less ATP per volume compared to other species,” Harnett says.

He now hopes to study where that extra energy might be going, and whether there are specific gene mutations that help neurons of the human cortex achieve this high efficiency. The researchers are also interested in exploring whether primate species that are more closely related to humans show similar decreases in ion channel density.

The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, a Friends of the McGovern Institute Fellowship, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows Program, the Dana Foundation David Mahoney Neuroimaging Grant Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Harvard-MIT Joint Research Grants Program in Basic Neuroscience, and Susan Haar.

Other authors of the paper include Norma Brown, an MIT technical associate; Marissa Hansen, a former post-baccalaureate scholar; Enrique Toloza, a graduate student at MIT and Harvard Medical School; Jitendra Sharma, an MIT research scientist; Ziv Williams, an associate professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School; Matthew Frosch, an associate professor of pathology and health sciences and technology at Harvard Medical School; Garth Rees Cosgrove, director of epilepsy and functional neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Sydney Cash, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

McGovern Institute Director receives highest honor from the Society for Neuroscience

by Julie Pryor |

The Society for Neuroscience will present its highest honor, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience, to McGovern Institute Director Robert Desimone at its annual meeting today.

The Gerard Prize is named for neuroscientist Ralph W. Gerard who helped establish the Society for Neuroscience, and honors “outstanding scientists who have made significant contributions to neuroscience throughout their careers.” Desimone will share the $30,000 prize with Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Jon Kaas.

Desimone is being recognized for his career contributions to understanding cortical function in the visual system. His seminal work on attention spans decades, including the discovery of a neural basis for covert attention in the temporal cortex and the creation of the biased competition model, suggesting that attention is biased towards material relevant to the task. More recent work revealed how synchronized brain rhythms help enhance visual processing. Desimone also helped discover both face cells and neural populations that identify objects even when the size or location of the object changes. His long list of contributions includes mapping the extrastriate visual cortex, publishing the first report of columns for motion processing outside the primary visual cortex, and discovering how the temporal cortex retains memories. Desimone’s work has moved the field from broad strokes of input and output to a more nuanced understanding of cortical function that allows the brain to make sense of the environment.

At its annual meeting, beginning today, the Society will honor Desimone and other leading researchers who have made significant contributions to neuroscience — including the understanding of cognitive processes, drug addiction, neuropharmacology, and theoretical models — with this year’s Outstanding Achievement Awards.

“The Society is honored to recognize this year’s awardees, whose groundbreaking research has revolutionized our understanding of the brain, from the level of the synapse to the structure and function of the cortex, shedding light on how vision, memory, perception of touch and pain, and drug
addiction are organized in the brain,” SfN President Barry Everitt, said. “This exceptional group of neuroscientists has made fundamental discoveries, paved the way for new therapeutic approaches, and introduced new tools that will lay the foundation for decades of research to come.”