News

The Carney Lab has received an STTR Grant titled "Speech Enhancement Based on Auditory Coding of Voiced Signals."

This project will test the feasibility of a novel speech-enhancement strategy based on recent physiological and modeling studies. The lab is joining forces with a small company, Omnispeech LLC, which has expertise in developing algorithms for speech enhancement for cell phone applications. The long-term goal is to develop signal-processing algorithms that will enhance speech in noisy environments for listeners with normal hearing or with hearing loss. In addition to cell phones, other applications could include hearing-aids or other assistive devices.

A new study out today in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that traumatic brain injury can disrupt the function of the brain's waste removal system. When this occurs, toxic proteins may accumulate in the brain, setting the stage for the onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

We know that traumatic brain injury early in life is a risk factor for the early development of dementia in the decades that follow, said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine and senior author of the article. This study shows that these injuries set into motion a cascading series of events that impair the brain's ability to clear waste, allowing proteins like tau to spread throughout the brain and eventually reach toxic levels.

The findings are the latest in a series of new insights that are fundamentally changing the way scientists understand neurological disorders. These discoveries are possible due to a study published in 2012 in which Nedergaard and her colleagues described a previously unknown system of waste removal that is unique to the brain which researchers have dubbed the glymphatic system.

Douglas Portman will start his term as President of the Chapter January 1^st, 2015.
Thank you for everyone who participated in the first presidential elections.
Thank you Krystel for serving as the first President and for reviving the Chapter.

David Knill

David C. Knill, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and associate director of the Center for Visual Science, passed away suddenly on October 6^th at the age of 53.

The University has more information in their newscenter.

The Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences has created a memorial website. From this site, you can post tributes or stories about Dave and invite friends and colleagues to post their own contributions.

Alumna, Maria Diehl, and NGP faculty, Lizabeth Romanski, published a paper in August 2014 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience on Responses of Prefrontal Multisensory Neurons to Mismatching Faces and Vocalizations.

Michele Saul, PhD

Dr. Michele Saul has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology beginning this Fall. Michele was a popular instructor in ANA 258 here at the UR, where she worked with Dr. Martha Johnson-Gdowski. In addition to her new faculty position, she will continue part-time as a Postdoctoral student in our Fudge lab developing her studies on adolescent stress models in rodents.

Make sure to congratulate her!!

Three first year NGP students received Convocation Awards this year.

• Laura Duclos was awarded the Graduate Alumni Fellowship Award
• Rianne Stowell received the Merritt & Marjorie Cleveland Fellowship Award
• Jessica Hogestyn received the Irving Spar Fellowship Award

Congratulations to All!

Congratulations to this year's Award Recipients

• Grayson Sipe won a travel award from the Schmitt Program in Integrative Brain Research to attend the EMBL Conference, Microglia: Guardians of the Brain, held on 26-29 March 2014 in Heidelberg, Germany.
• Heather Natola won a travel award from the Schmitt Program in Integrative Brain Research to attend the 45^th annual American Society of Neurochemistry meeting in Long Beach, CA, March 8-12, 2014.
• Adrianne Chesser received a travel award to attend the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on July 12-17, 2014 where she presented a poster.
• Julianne Feola received a travel award from Graduate Women in Science to attend the Gordon Research Conference in Italy from June 29 - July 4,2014.
• Ryan Dawes was awarded a Trainee Scholar Award from the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society.

The photography of Gary Paige was been recognized in the leading photography magazine for serious photographers, Shutterbug Magazine. His photograph of Havana Glen Park, NY was also the featured photograph on the contents page.

The magazine recognized Gary's work for the monthly assignment of Super Depth of Field in an urban, landscape or nature photograph. Depth of field is the relationship of the foreground and the background focus within the image. This is determined by a combination of the lens focal length, the aperture used and the distance to the foreground subject matter.

Congratulations Gary! Continue the fantastic shooting.

William E. O'Neill, PhD

After more than 35 years of service to URMC, Bill has retired to devote more time to personal endeavors. He will remain deeply involved in the studies of his current students who appreciate his wealth of expertise.

Bill was Associate Professor in both the Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy at the Medical Center and for Brain/Cognitive Sciences on the River Campus. He will be deeply missed.

Make sure to congratulate him when you see him.

Gary D. Paige, M.D., Ph.D., is stepping down after 16 years of service as chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy. M. Kerry O’Banion, M.D., Ph.D., will serve as interim chair effective July 1, 2014 while a national search for a permanent chair is conducted.

Anne Leubke, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Neurobiology & Anatomy, and Loisa Bennetto, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, presented Listening through Noise: Search for Autism Biomarkers on March 25^th in the Helen Wood Hall Auditorium as part of the spring CTSI Seminar Series.

Those wishing to see the presentation can see a video taped copy from the URMC media site. Login is required with your NetID.

Loisa Bennetto, director of the developmental neuropsychology lab in the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, will present a talk on Understanding Autism at the next "Got Health?" event on Thursday, March 20. The free lecture will be held from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. in the Rundel Auditorium at the Rochester Central Library, 115 South Ave. The talk is sponsored by the Center for Community Health in partnership with the Central Library.

Grayson Sipe, 4^th year Neuroscience Graduate Program student in Dr. Ania Majewska's lab was awarded NIH (NRSA) Individual Pre-doctoral Fellowship from NINDS. The title of his project is: Role of P2Y12 and Purinergic Signaling in Microglia-Mediated Synaptic Plasticity (2013-2016). Congrats Grayson!

Elk Lake, North Hudson, Adirondacks
State Park, New York, USA

Dr. Gary Paige's photographic work has received an honorable mention in the 8th Annual Digital Photo Contest sponsored by The Nature Conservancy.

The contest was open to all photographers internationally at least 18 years of age. The contest highlighted remarkable digital imagery featuring nature and people. Dr. Paige's entry was among the fourteen honorable mentions after the top five finalists had been determined.

Cochlear inner hair cell from an adult mouse, viewed as a three-dimensional reconstruction from a whole mount confocal stack. The inner hair cell is labeled with Myo7a (grey), ribbon synapses and hair cell nuclei are labeled with CtBP2 (red), and glutamate receptors are labeled with Gria2/3 (green). This technique was used to analyze the role of Foxo3 in the adult mouse cochlea. For more information see Gilels et al..

Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Patricia White's most recent publication, Mutation of Foxo3 Causes Adult Onset Auditory Neuropathy and Alters Cochlear Synapse Architecture in Mice has been featured in the November edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. In addition, an image of a cochlear inner hair cell from the article was also selected as the cover for that journal.

Dr. White received her bachelor's degree in Biology from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1989. She completed her Ph.D. degree in Developmental Biology, also at Caltech, in 2000, where she researched neural stem cells. She began post-doctoral work in hearing regeneration at the House Ear Institute, and joined the faculty at the University of Rochester Medical and Dental Center in 2010.

The White lab's goal is to find a biological treatment to reverse noise-induced hearing loss through a better understanding of the function of different genes in the cochlea.

Professor Laurel Carney received a renewal for another five years for her NIH-NIDCD grant entitled Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds. The new emphasis for the next five years is to investigate neural coding of speech sounds, starting with vowels. This new direction is possible thanks to the collaboration with Professor Joyce McDonough from the Linguistics Department. This grant will support graduate students and a post-doc in BME, Linguistics, or related fields who are interested in speech coding in the brain.

The University of Rochester Medical Center is currently recruiting subjects with JNCL for a clinical trial. This research study will focus on evaluating whether an investigational drug is safe and well tolerated in children with JNCL. Mycophenolate mofetil (also known as Cellcept) is a medication that suppresses the immune system. The study is 22 weeks long with a total of 8 in-person visits and 4 telephone contacts. Four visits require travel to University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York, and four visits are with your child’s local physician. Four contacts take place by telephone. Travel costs are covered by the study. Children enrolled in the study will take mycophenolate syrup twice a day, and will have blood drawn at each study visit to monitor safety.

More information on the trial can be found at ClinicalTrials.gov, Time Warner Cable News (Rochester, NY television affiliate) and the URMC Newsroom.

For further information, please contact Amy Vierhile at (585) 275-4762.

The US team believe the waste removal system is one of the fundamental reasons for sleep. Their study, in the journal Science, showed brain cells shrink during sleep to open up the gaps between neurons and allow fluid to wash the brain clean. They also suggest that failing to clear away some toxic proteins may play a role in brain disorders.

One big question for sleep researchers is why do animals sleep at all when it leaves them vulnerable to predators? It has been shown to have a big role in the fixing of memories in the brain and learning, but a team at the University of Rochester Medical Centre believe that housework may be one of the primary reasons for sleep.

The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up, said researcher Dr Maiken Nedergaard. You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can't really do both at the same time.

Anasuya Das, a former student in Dr. Krystel Huxlin's lab who defended her PhD thesis on July 18, 2013 was awarded the Doty Award for Excellence in Neuroscience Dissertation Research during 2013 Neuroscience Retreat.

Christina Cloninger, a 4^th-year student in Dr. Gary Paige's lab, won second place in the John Bartlett Poster Session during 2013 Neuroscience Retreat, Rochester, NY.

Ryan Dawes, a third-year student in Dr. Ed Brown's lab, won a travel award from the Schmitt Program on Integrative Brain Research. Ryan plans to use this award to attend the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Advances in Breast Cancer Research Conference, which is being held in San Diego from October 3^rd-6^th, 2013.

The annual Neuroscience Retreat, sponsored by the Neuroscience Graduate Program and the University Committee for Interdisciplinary Studies, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 13, at the Memorial Art Gallery. The retreat will feature keynote speaker Martin Chalfie, University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; talks from current and former faculty and graduate students; and a poster session. The event is free and open to the University community but advance registration is required. To register or for more information, visit the retreat website.

The 2013 Vincent du Vigneaud commencement award for PhD research went to Ethan Winkler, an MD/PhD student in Dr. Zlokovic's lab. To date, Ethan has 12 publications, six of which he is first author or shares that position with Dr. R. Bell. These include publications in some of the very best journals like Nature and Nature Neuroscience. Congratulations, Ethan!

Helen Wei, Neuroscience and MD/PhD student in Dr. Maiken Nedergaard's lab was awarded the HHMI Med-Into-Grad Fellowship (September 2013-August 2014). Helen's current project is astrocytes in neurodegenerative disease. Congrats Helen!

Jennifer Stripay, 3^rd year Neuroscience Graduate student in Dr. Mark Noble's lab was awarded F31 NIH (NRSA) Individual Pre-doctoral Fellowship for her project entitled: Identifying c-Cbl as a critical point of intervention in glioblastoma multiforme (September 2013-August 2016). Congrats Jennifer!

Adam Pallus, NGP graduate student in Dr. Ed Freedman's lab, Rebecca Lowery, NGP student in Dr. Ania Majewska's lab, and NGP student, Brianna Sleezer in Dr. Ben Hayden's lab were awarded a competitive graduate fellowship from the University of Rochester Center for Visual Science from 7/1/13 to 12/31/13. CVS offers competitive graduate fellowships for graduate students working in the lab of a CVS faculty member. Applications are made by a student's advisor to the vision training committee in CVS. Fellows receive full stipend support as well as funds to cover one academic conference per year.

Christina Cloninger and Colin Lockwood have been awarded a Hearing, Balance, and Spatial Orientation Training Grant by the National Institutes of Health. The Hearing, Balance, and Spatial Orientation Training Grant (T32) is funded by the NIH National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The grant involves the collaborative efforts of the Departments of Otolaryngology, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurobiology & Anatomy. The grant supports PhD students, MD-PhD students, Post-doctoral fellows and Medical Residents in BME, Neuroscience, and Otolaryngology who are involved in research related to the auditory and vestibular systems. This Training Grant is an important resource for the University of Rochester's Center for Navigation and Communication Sciences, which provides technical and administrative support for 25 faculty members who are conducting research in this area. The grant provides financial support for several trainees each year. In association with the Training Grant, a graduate-level course entitled Hearing and Balance: Structure, Function and Disease is offered.

Matthew Cavanaugh, Michael Chen, Heather Natola, Felix Ramos-Busot, Rebecca Rausch, and Aleta Steevens have been awarded a competitive graduate fellowship, the Neuroscience Training Grant. This grant is funded by the National Institute of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. This prestigious appointment provides stipend, tuition support, travel funds as well as funds to cover trainee related expenses. Students are appointed to the NSC Training Grant by the NGP committee.

Congratulations and best wishes to Laura Yunes-Medina for being awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Predoctoral Fellowships! This grant will support her research work on defining CHOP-10 dependent adaptive ER stress pathways in neurons.

Dr. Richard Aslin

Richard Aslin, the William R. Kenan Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging at the University of Rochester, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. Aslin will be inducted into the academy next April during its 151st annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

This honor is richly deserved. Dick is a pioneer in the field of cognitive development, said Peter Lennie, provost and the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences and Engineering. His work has opened up a major new field and has transformed our understanding of how infants learn.

Dr. Scott Seidman and Ankit Medhekar, BME class of '13.
(Photo by J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester)

The University of Rochester Student's Association has named Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology & Anatomy professor, Scott Seidman, The Undergraduate Engineering and Applied Sciences Professor of the Year.

The award was presented at an awards ceremony in the Welles-Brown and Hawkins-Carlson Room in Rush Rhees Library. The ceremony and a poster session were part of the 2013 Undergraduate Research Expo that took place in the library on April 19, 2013. One of Dr. Seidman's students, Ankit Medhekar, BME class of '13, presented him with the award. Congratulations Scott!

Kelli Fagan, a third-year NGP student in Doug Portman's lab, won first place in the Multicellular/Organismal category the Graduate Student Society poster session held on Apr. 5, 2013. Kelli's poster was entitled Sexually dimorphic neuromodulatory signaling elicits sex differences in sensory behavior. Along with this honor comes an $800 travel award that will allow Kelli to present her work at the upcoming Cell Symposium on Genes, Circuits and Behavior in Toronto, Canada. Congratulations, Kelli!

Revathi Balasubramanian and her mentor,
Dr. Barbara Davis.

Revathi Balasubramanian, a Neuroscience Graduate Program student in Dr. Lin Gan's lab, studying the role of transcription factors in retinal neurogenesis, has been named a winner of the 2013 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student. Only a handful of these are awarded each year, and all this year's nominees were extremely well-qualified. Congratulations Revathi!

Neuroscience Graduate Program student, Ryan Dawes, has been awarded a 2013 Breast Cancer Research Grant, from the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester. The 1-year, $50,000 grant will fund his project, entitled Breast Cancer Exosomes, Novel Intermediaries in Psychosocial Stress-induced Tumor Pathogenesis and was only one of two applications to be awarded this prestigious grant. This work will investigate if psychosocial stress can modulate the number or content of secreted small vesicles (exosomes), and determine if this can alter the process of tumorigenesis in an animal model of spontaneous breast cancer as Ryan continues his research in Dr. Edward Brown's lab.

Congratulations to NGP Graduate Student, Anasuya Das on winning a travel award to present her work at the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) in Alghero, Italy on September 2-6, 2012. Anasuya works in Dr. Krystel Huxlin's lab in the Visual Training & Rehabilitation Lab. Her poster was entitled, Beyond blindsight: perceptual re-learning of visual motion discrimination in cortical blindness improves static orientation discrimination.