Institute News: Announcements

Five graduate students awarded McGovern fellowships

Anne Trafton |

This year, five graduate students have been awarded fellowships made possible by McGovern supporters.

Leah Acker, a fifth year graduate student in the labs of Ed Boyden and Robert Desimone, has been awarded a 2013-14 Friends of the McGovern Fellowship. Leah is focused on understanding the basis of neural dynamics underlying complex behaviors in primate models. She is developing extremely precise optogenetic technologies for observing neural circuits that give rise to high level cognitive functions such as attention. Leah hopes her work will lead to the development of new treatments for brain disorders.

Graduate student Yinqing Li, a member of Feng Zhang‘s lab, has been awarded a Friends of the McGovern Fellowship for his work sequencing the connectome, a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain. Yinqing’s research has involved developing novel technologies for barcoding individual neurons with unique identifiers, and then pooling, amplifying, and preparing individual neurons for next-generation sequencing. His work has the promise to fundamentally change the way systems neuroscientists learn about the connections underlying neural circuit function.

The Mark Gorenberg ’76 Fellowship has been awarded to Leyla Isik, a fourth year graduate student studying with Tomaso Poggio, for her research into the visual system. Bridging neuroscience and computer science, Leyla uses sophisticated computer simulations and magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging of humans to develop improved computer algorithms for object recognition. Leyla has developed a methodology that enables a machine to identity which image a human subject is looking at on the basis of his or her MEG data, and is currently performing new experiments to understand how humans recognize these images under complex viewing conditions (such as in a cluttered background, or at different positions or viewpoints). Leyla hopes to use these insights to develop a new computational model that simulates how humans develop invariant object recognition

Tatsuo Okubo, a graduate student in Michale Fee‘s lab, is this year’s recipient of the Huburt Schoemaker Fellowship. Tots’ research is focused on understanding the brain circuitry underlying the development of complex learned behaviors. Using young songbirds just learning to sing as a model, Tots is investigating the role of the premotor area HVC in the avian brain, which is analogous to Broca’s area in the human brain. Tots employs sophisticated electrophysiological recording techniques while the bird is singing to observe the process of learning at the level of individual neurons. His goal is to understand how the activity pattern in the premotor area changes during song learning, and he hopes this research will give insight into learning complex behavior in general such as language acquisition in humans.

The Janet and Sheldon (1959) Razin Fellowship has been awarded to Joshua Manning, a graduate student in John Gabrieli‘s Lab. Josh’s goal is to use neuroimaging to understand decision making, risk taking, and sense of reward in the brains of healthy people as well as individuals with psychiatric disorders. He is working with sophisticated computer models, MRI scans, and personality and cognitive data to develop a better sense of the brain basis of psychiatric illnesses. Josh hopes to advance our knowledge of the neurological root of behaviors linked to impatience and impulsivity in individuals with brain disorders such as anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Feng Zhang named to Popular Science Brilliant 10

Anne Trafton |

Popular Science magazine has named two MIT junior faculty members — Pedro Reis and Feng Zhang — to its 2013 Brilliant 10 list of young stars in science and technology. The list will appear in the magazine’s October issue.

“Popular Science prides itself on revealing the innovations and ideas that are laying today’s groundwork for tomorrow’s breakthroughs, and the Brilliant 10 is one of the most exciting ways we do that,” says Jake Ward, editor-in-chief. “This collection of 10 brilliant young researchers is our chance to honor the most promising work — and the most hardworking people — in science and technology today. This year’s winners are particularly distinguished and I’m proud to welcome them all as members of the 2013 Brilliant 10.”

Pedro Reis, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, studies the mechanics of slender structures, with a particular focus on devising new ways of turning mechanical failure into functionality.

Over the past few years, Reis, 35, has published a number of eclectic and impactful papers in prominent journals. In 2009 he reported on the delamination of thin films adhered to soft foundations, which is relevant for stretchable electronics. He explained why adhesive films tear into triangular shapes, a problem that applies to both the everyday peeling of adhesive tape from a roll and the manufacturing of tapered graphene nanoribbons. Motivated by the closing of aquatic flowers, he recently discovered a new mechanism for passively pipetting liquids using a petal-shaped object. And last year inspired by a toy, Reis introduced the Buckliball, a new class of structures that uses buckling to provide origami-like folding capabilities to curved structures with potential uses for encapsulation and soft robotics.

In other work undertaken just for fun, Reis and colleagues reported in 2010 that when cats lap fluids (milk or water, for example), they take advantage of a perfect balance between gravity and inertia.

Feng Zhang, 31, is the W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering, an assistant professor in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a core member of the Broad Institute. He received the award for his work on genome editing. Earlier this year he reported a powerful new way to make targeted mutations in genomic DNA, based on a bacterial system known as CRISPR. The new method will greatly accelerate the development of animal models of human genetic diseases, and may eventually make it possible to correct genetic mutations in patients. Zhang, a pioneer in optogenetics, has also recently invented a new method for controlling gene expression with light, in which light-sensitive plant proteins are engineered to create an “optical switch” that can turn other genes on or off at will.

This is the 12th annual Brilliant 10 list. Ten MIT researchers were included on previous lists.

McGovern Institute gets new brain scanner

Anne Trafton |

After months of planning and construction, we are delighted to report that we have installed a new 3-tesla MRI scanner for human neuroimaging. The $2M scanner, a Siemens Magnetom Trio, was delivered to the Martinos Imaging Center on July 25, 2013.

The core of the scanner is a large electromagnet, weighing around 13 tons and containing superconducting coils that are chilled in liquid helium to within a few degrees of absolute zero. It is housed in a custom-built room, with a specially reinforced floor to support the scanner’s weight, and with some 5000 steel panels to shield the system from RF interference.

The acquisition of the new scanner was made possible by Bruce Dayton, Jeffrey and Nancy Halis, the Simons Foundation, and an anonymous donor.  The scanner is expected to be fully operational by the fall, and will be used for a wide range of studies on brain function, in both children and adults.

Click here to view a photo album of the MRI installation.

Obama hosts Dresselhaus, Graybiel and Luu in Oval Office

Anne Trafton |

President Barack Obama met Thursday, March 28, in the Oval Office with the six U.S. recipients of the 2012 Kavli Prizes — including MIT’s Mildred S. Dresselhaus, Ann M. Graybiel and Jane X. Luu. Obama and his science and technology advisor, John P. Holdren, received the scientists to recognize their landmark contributions in nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics, respectively. [watch video]

“American scientists, engineers and innovators strengthen our nation every day and in countless ways, but the all-stars honored by the Kavli Foundation deserve special praise for the scale of their advances in some of the most important and exciting research disciplines today,” said Holdren, who also serves as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “I am grateful not only for their profound accomplishments, but for the inspiration they are providing to a new generation of doers, makers and discoverers.”

The researchers received their Kavli Prizes for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of the outer solar system; of the differences in material properties at nano- and larger scales; and of how the brain receives and responds to sensations such as sight, sound and touch.

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics was awarded to Luu, David C. Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system. The Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune and is a disk of more than 70,000 small bodies made of rock and ice, and orbiting the sun. Jewitt and Luu discovered the Kuiper Belt, and Brown discovered and characterized many of its largest members.

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience was awarded to Dresselhaus for her work explaining why the properties of materials structured at the nanoscale can vary so much from those of the same materials at larger dimensions. Her early work provided the foundation for later discoveries concerning the famous C60 buckyball, carbon nanotubes and graphene. Dresselhaus received the Kavli Prize for her research into uniform oscillations of elastic arrangements of atoms or molecules called phonons; phonon-electron interactions; and heat conductivity in nanostructures.

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience was awarded to Graybiel, Cornelia Isabella Bargmann of Rockefeller University, and Winfried Denk of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, who have pioneered the study of how sensory signals pass from the point of sensation — whether the eye, the foot or the nose — to the brain, and how decisions are made to respond. Each working on different parts of the brain, and using different techniques and models, they have combined precise neuroanatomy with sophisticated functional studies to gain understanding of their chosen systems.

MIT researchers join Obama for brain announcement

Anne Trafton |

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.

 

Martha Constantine-Paton to receive top honors from Tufts University

Anne Trafton |

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.

Ed Boyden to share prestigious brain prize

Anne Trafton |

Ed Boyden, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, was today named a recipient of the 2013 Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize. The 1 million Euro prize is awarded for the development of optogenetics, a technology that makes it possible to control brain activity using light.

The Brain Prize is awarded annually by the Denmark-based Lundbeck Foundation for outstanding contributions to European neuroscience. Boyden is recognized for work done in collaboration with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, which builds on earlier discoveries by four European researchers: Ernst Bamberg, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann in Germany, and Gero Miesenböck, now in Oxford, U.K. The prize will be shared equally between all six researchers.

The idea of using light to control brain activity was suggested by Francis Crick in 1999, and Miesenbock performed a proof of concept demonstration in 2002, showing that light-sensitive proteins obtained from the eyes of fruit-flies could be used to activate mammalian neurons. A further breakthrough was enabled by the discovery of channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), a light-activated ion channel from a common pond algal species that had been characterized by Hegemann in Martinsried and by Nagel and Bamberg in Frankfurt.

The application of ChR2 to neuroscience was pioneered by Boyden and Deisseroth at Stanford University, where Deisseroth is now a faculty member. In a collaboration that began when Boyden was a graduate student and Deisseroth a postdoctoral fellow, they obtained the ChR2 gene from Nagel and Bamberg, expressed it in cultured neurons, and pulsed the dish with blue light to see whether it could trigger neural activity. The first experiment was performed in August 2004, and it worked first time; as Boyden recounted in a recent historical article, “serendipity had struck — the molecule was good enough in its wild-type form to be used in neurons right away.”

They reported this result in 2005, in a landmark paper in Nature Neuroscience that has now been cited more than 600 times. Their method, later dubbed “optogenetics,” is now used by hundreds of labs worldwide and is also being explored for a wide range of potential therapeutic applications. In announcing the Brain Prize, the chairman of the selection committee, Professor Colin Blakemore, described optogenetics as “arguably the most important technical advance in neuroscience in the past 40 years.”

Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2006, where he is now the Benesse Career Development Professor in the Media Lab, with joint appointments at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His contributions have been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including the inaugural AF Harvey Prize and the 2011 Perl/UNC prize (shared with Karl Deisseroth and with Feng Zhang, also at MIT). He continues to develop novel optogenetic tools, along with many other technologies for understanding and manipulating neural circuits within the living brain.

Boyden’s work was supported by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, Jerry and Marge Burnett, DARPA and the Department of Defense, Google, Harvard/MIT Joint Grants Program in Basic Neuroscience, Human Frontiers Science Program, IET A. F. Harvey Prize, MIT McGovern Institute and MIT Media Lab, NARSAD, New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator Award, NIH, NSF, Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator in Neuroscience Award, Shelly Razin, SkTech, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Society for Neuroscience Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience (RAIN), and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.

Mehrdad Jazayeri to join McGovern Institute faculty

by McGovern Institute |

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Mehrdad Jazayeri as an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He will join the institute in January 2013, with a faculty appointment as assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Complex behaviors rely on a combination of sensory evidence, prior experience and knowledge about potential costs and benefits. Jazayeri’s research is focused on the neural mechanisms that enable the brain to integrate these internal and external cues and to produce flexible goal-directed behavior.

In his dissertation work with J. Anthony Movshon at New York University, Jazayeri asked how the brain uses unreliable sensory signals to make probabilistic inferences. His work led to a simple computational scheme that explained how information in visual cortical maps is used for a variety of visual perceptual tasks. Later, as a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow, he began to investigate the role of prior experience on perception. Working in the laboratory of Michael Shadlen at the University of Washington, he used a simple timing task to show that humans exploit their prior experience of temporal regularities to make better estimates of time intervals. Using a rigorous mathematical framework — Bayesian estimation — this work provided a detailed model for quantifying how measurements, prior expectations and internal goals influence timing behavior.

Jazayeri then turned to monkey electrophysiology to study how neurons process timing information and how they combine sensory cues with prior experience. For this work, he taught monkeys to reproduce time intervals, as if keeping the beat in music. The animals were provided with beats 1 and 2 and were rewarded for producing a third beat at the correct time. By recording from sensorimotor neurons in the parietal cortex during this task, Jazayeri showed that the pattern of activity is very different during the measurement and production phases of the task, even though the interval is the same.  Moreover, he found that the response dynamics of parietal neurons were shaped not only by the immediate time cues but also by the intervals monkeys had encountered in preceding trials.

Building on his previous work, Jazayeri will pursue two long-term research themes at MIT. One line of research will examine how brain circuits measure and produce time, an ability that is crucial for mental capacities such as learning causes and effects, “intuitive physics,” and sequencing thoughts and actions. The other line of research will exploit timing tasks to understand the neural basis of sensorimotor integration, a key component of cognitive functions such as deliberation and probabilistic reasoning.

Understanding complex behaviors such as flexible timing or sensorimotor integration requires methods for manipulating the activity of specific structures and circuits within the brain. Optogenetics, the ability to control brain activity using light, has emerged as a powerful tool for such studies. In a recent collaboration with Greg Horwitz at the Univeristy of Washington, Jazayeri reported the first successful application of optogenetics to evoke a behavioral response in primates. Motivated by this proof-of-principle experiment, Jazayeri plans to combine the traditional tools of psychophysics and electrophysiology with optogenetic manipulations to characterize the circuits that control timing and sensorimotor integration in the primate brain.

Originally from Iran, Jazayeri obtained his B.Sc in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. He received his PhD from New York University, where he studied with J. Anthony Movshon, winning the Dean’s award for the most outstanding dissertation in the university.  After graduating, he was awarded a Helen Hay Whitney fellowship to join the laboratory of Michael Shadlen at the University of Washington, where he has been since 2007.

Martha Constantine-Paton wins lifetime achievement award

Anne Trafton |

Constantine-Paton, a leading figure in the field of developmental neuroscience, has been awarded the Society for Neuroscience’s Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award recognizes individuals with outstanding career achievements in neuroscience who have also actively promoted the professional advancement of women in neuroscience. Constantine-Paton will be recognized for her achievements during the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting this October.

Over the past 30 years, Constantine-Paton has established a reputation as a leading figure in the field of developmental neuroscience. In particular, her pioneering work on NMDA receptor-dependent plasticity laid the groundwork for our current understanding of how the brain becomes correctly wired in response to activity and experience.

She has also mentored many students and postdocs, among them several prominent women scientists, and she is very active in promoting the career development of her junior colleagues.

“Martha’s research contributions have been extremely influential within her field, and her influence has also been felt through her exemplary record of mentoring and service,” says McGovern Institute director Robert Desimone. “Martha’s career indeed represents a lifetime of achievement and I cannot imagine a more deserving recipient for this honor.”

Ann Graybiel wins Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

Anne Trafton |

Three MIT researchers including Ann Graybiel  are among seven pioneering scientists worldwide named today as this year’s recipients of the Kavli Prizes.

These prizes recognize scientists for their seminal advances in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience, and include a cash award of $1 million in each field. This year’s laureates were selected for their fundamental contributions to our understanding of the outer solar system; the differences in material properties at the nanoscale and at larger scales; and how the brain receives and responds to sensations such as sight, sound and touch.

The Kavli Prizes, awarded biennially since 2008, are a partnership between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Today’s announcement was made by Nils Christian Stenseth, president of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and transmitted live at the opening event of the World Science Festival in New York.

King Harald of Norway will present the Kavli Prizes to the laureates at an award ceremony in Oslo on Sept. 4. The ceremony will be hosted by Ã…se Kleveland, former minister of culture for Norway, and Alan Alda, the actor, director, writer and longtime supporter of science.

The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics is shared by Jane X. Luu, a technical staff member at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, along with David C. Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles and Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology. They received the prize “for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system.”

In 1992, Luu and Jewitt spotted the first known object in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune’s orbit that is more than 30 times Earth’s distance from the sun. Since then, they and others have identified more than 1,000 Kuiper Belt objects. Astronomers are particularly interested in these objects because their composition may resemble the primordial material that coalesced around the sun during the formation of our solar system.

Brown followed in Luu and Jewitt’s footsteps by searching the Kuiper Belt for planet-sized bodies. In 2005, he found Eris, an object about the same size as Pluto but with 27 percent more mass. As a result, astronomers revisited the definition of planets; Pluto was subsequently relegated to “dwarf planet” status.

The Kavli Prize in Nanoscience

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience is given to Mildred S. Dresselhaus, Institute Professor Emerita of Physics and Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, “for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures.”

Over five decades, Dresselhaus has made multiple advances explaining how the nanoscale properties of materials can vary from those of the same materials at larger dimensions. Her early work on carbon fibers and on compounds made up of different chemical species sandwiched between graphite layers — known as graphite intercalation compounds — laid the groundwork for later discoveries concerning buckyballs, carbon nanotubes and graphene.

The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience is shared by Ann M. Graybiel, Institute Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, along with Cornelia Isabella Bargmann of Rockefeller University and Winfried Denk of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. They received the prize “for elucidating basic neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and decision.”

Graybiel, of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, has identified and traced neural loops connecting the outer layer of the brain to a region called the striatum, revealing that these form the basis for linking sensory cues to actions involved in habitual behaviors. Her work has provided a deeper understanding of human ability to make or break habits, and of what goes wrong in disorders involving movement and repetitive behaviors.

Bargmann has used nematode worms to provide insights into the molecular controls of animal behavior, yielding important advances including the discovery of the first evidence that odor response is governed by neurons; of the intracellular signaling pathways between odorant receptors and sensory neurons; and of specific neurons, receptors and neurotransmitters involved in behavior adaption following experience.

Two techniques developed by Denk have answered major questions about how information is transmitted from the eye to the brain: His invention of two-photon laser scanning fluorescence microscopy allowed imaging of living tissue at greater depths and with less unwanted background fluorescence, and his development of serial block-face electron microscopy allowed detailed 3-D imaging of minute structures within tissue.

About the Kavli Prizes

Kavli Prize recipients are chosen biennially by committees of distinguished international scientists recommended by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Society, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. The recommendations of these prize committees are then confirmed by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

The Kavli Prizes were initiated by and named after Fred Kavli, founder and chairman of the Kavli Foundation, which is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work.

For more detailed information on each of the prizes including a video of the 2012 award ceremony, see the Kavli Prize website.