Category Archives: Neuroscience

Neuroscience

What Does Neuroscience Have To Do With Exercise? A Lot According To Cyborggainz: A New Way Of Thinking About Well Rounded Fitness – Yahoo Finance

Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- It was past 9 p.m. on Financial Street in Beijing by the time the figure inside Huarong Tower there picked up an inkbrush and, with practiced strokes, began to set characters to paper.Another trying workday was ending for Wang Zhanfeng, corporate chairman, Chinese Communist Party functionaryand, less happily, replacement for a man who very recently had been executed.On this April night, Wang was spotted unwinding as he often does in his office: practicing the art of Chinese calligraphy, a form that expresses the beauty of classical characters and, it is said, the nature of the person who writes them.Its mastery requires patience, resolve, skill, calmand Wang, 54, needs all that and more. Because here on Financial Street, a brisk walk from the hulking headquarters of the Peoples Bank of China, a dark drama is playing out behind the mirrored faade of Huarong Tower. How it unfolds will test Chinas vast, debt-ridden financial system, the technocrats working to fix it, and the foreign banks and investors caught in the middle.Welcome to the headquarters of China Huarong Asset Management Co., the troubled state-owned bad bank that has set teeth on edge around the financial world.For months now Wang and others have been trying to clean up the mess here at Huarong, an institution that sitsquite literallyat the center of Chinas financial power structure. To the south is the central bank, steward of the worlds second-largest economy; to the southwest, the Ministry of Finance, Huarongs principal shareholder; less than 300 meters to the west, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, entrusted with safeguarding the financial system and, of late, ensuring Huarong has a funding backstop from state-owned banks until at least August.The patch though doesnt settle the question of how Huarong makes good on some $41 billion borrowed on the bond markets, most incurred under Wangs predecessor before he was ensnared in a sweeping crackdown on corruption. That long-time executive, Lai Xiaomin, was put to death in Januaryhis formal presence expunged from Huarong right down to the signature on its stock certificates.The bigger issue is what all this might portend for the nations financial system and efforts by Chinas leader, Xi Jinping, to centralize control, rein in years of risky borrowing and set the nations financial house in order.Theyre damned if they do and damned if they dont, said Michael Pettis, a Beijing-based professor of finance at Peking University and author of Avoiding the Fall: Chinas Economic Restructuring. Bailing out Huarong would reinforce the behavior of investors who ignore risk, he said, while a default endangers financial stability if a chaotic repricing of the bond market ensues.Just what is going on inside Huarong Tower? Given the stakes, few are willing to discuss that question publicly. But interviews with people who work there, as well as at various Chinese regulators, provide a glimpse into the eye of this storm.Huarong, simply put, has been in full crisis mode ever since it delayed its 2020 earnings results, eroding investor confidence. Executives have come to expect to be summoned by government authorities at a moments notice whenever market sentiment sours and the price of Huarong debt sinks anew. Wang and his team must provide weekly written updates on Huarongs operations and liquidity. They have turned to state-owned banks, pleading for support, and reached out to bond traders to try to calm nerves, with little lasting success.In public statements, Huarong has insisted repeatedly that its position is ultimately sound and that it will honor its obligations. Banking regulators have had to sign off on the wording of those statementsanother sign of how serious the situation is considered and, ultimately, whos in charge.Then there are regular audiences with the finance ministry and the other powerful financial bureaucracies nearby. Among items usually on the agenda: possible plans to hive off various Huarong businesses.Huarong executives are often kept waiting and, people familiar with the meetings say, tend to gain only limited access to top officials at the CBIRC, the banking overseer.The countrys apex financial watchdogchaired by Liu He, Xis right-hand man in overseeing the economy and financial systemhas asked for briefings on the Huarong situation and coordinated meetings between regulators, according to regulatory officials. But it has yet to communicate to them a long-term solution, including whether to impose losses on bondholders, the officials said.Representatives at the Peoples Bank of China, the CBIRC, Huarong and the Ministry of Finance didnt respond to requests for comment.Focus on BasicsA mid-level party functionary with a PhD in finance from Chinas reputed Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Wang arrived at Huarong Tower in early 2018, just as the corruption scandal was consuming the giant asset management company. He is regarded inside Huarong as low-key and down-to-earth, particularly in comparison to the companys previous leader, Lai, a man once known as the God of Wealth.Hundreds of Huarong staff, from Beijing division chiefs to branch employees in faraway outposts, listened in on April 16 as Wang reviewed the quarterly numbers. He stressed that the companys fundamentals had improved since he took over, a view shared by some analysts though insufficient to pacify investors. But he had little to say about what is on so many minds: plans to restructure and shore up the giant company, which hed pledged to clean up within three years of taking over.His main message to the troops: focus on the basics, like collecting on iffy assets and improving risk management. The employees were silent. No one asked a question.One employee characterized the mood in his area as business as usual. Another said co-workers at a Huarong subsidiary were worried the company might not be able to pay their salaries. Theres a widening gulf between the old guard and new, said a third staffer. Those who outlasted Lai and have seen their compensation cut year after year have little confidence in the turnaround, while new joiners are more hopeful about the opportunities the change of direction offers.Others joke that Huarong Tower must suffer from bad feng shui: after Lai was arrested, a bank that had a branch in the building had to be bailed out to the tune of $14 billion.Dark humor aside, a rough consensus has begun to emerge among senior management and mid-level regulators: like other key state-owned enterprises, Huarong still appears to be considered too big to fail. Many have come away with the impressionand it is that, an impressionthat for now, at least, the Chinese government will stand behind Huarong.At the very least, these people say, no serious financial tumult, such as a default by Huarong, is likely to be permitted while the Chinese Communist Party is planning a nationwide spectacle to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding on July 1. Those festivities will give Xiwho has been positioning to stay in power indefinitelyan opportunity to cement his place among Chinas most powerful leaders including Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.Huarong is nowhere near defaulting, the managing editor of Caixin Media wrote in an opinion piece on Saturday. Neither the Ministry of Finance nor Chinese regulators would allow it, Ling Huawei wrote.What will come after that patriotic outpouring on July 1 is uncertain, even to many inside Huarong Tower. Liu He, Chinas vice premier and chair of the powerful Financial Stability and Development Committee, appears in no hurry to force a difficult solution. Silence from Beijing has started to rattle local debt investors, who until about a week ago had seemed unmoved by the sell-off in Huarongs offshore bonds.Competing InterestsHuarongs role in absorbing and disposing of lenders soured debt is worth preserving to support the banking sector cleanup, but requires government intervention, according to Dinny McMahon, an economic analyst for Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China and author of Chinas Great Wall of Debt.We anticipate that foreign bondholders will be required to take a haircut, but it will be relatively small, he said. It will be designed to signal that investors should not assume government backing translates into carte blanche support.For now, in the absence of direct orders from the top, Huarong has been caught in the middle of the competing interests among various state-owned enterprises and government bureaucracies.China Investment Corp., the $1 trillion sovereign fund, for instance, has turned down the idea of taking a controlling stake from the finance ministry. CIC officials have argued they dont have the bandwidth or capability to fix Huarongs problems, according to people familiar with the matter.The Peoples Bank of China, meantime, is still trying to decide whether to proceed with a proposal that would see it assume more than 100 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) of bad assets from Huarong, those people said.And the Ministry of Finance, which owns 57% of Huarong on behalf of the Chinese government, hasnt committed to recapitalizing the company, though it hasnt ruled it out, either, one person said.CIC didnt respond to requests for comment.The banking regulator has bought Huarong some time, brokering an agreement with state-owned lenders including Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. that would cover any funding needed to repay the equivalent of $2.5 billion coming due by the end of August. By then, the company aims to have completed its 2020 financial statements after spooking investors by missing deadlines in March and April.How China deals with Huarong will have wide ramifications on global investors perception of and confidence in Chinese SOEs, said Wu Qiong, a Hong Kong-based executive director at BOC International Holdings. Should any defaults trigger a reassessment of the level of government support assumed in rating SOE credits, it would have deep repercussions for the offshore market.The announcement of a new addition to Wangs team underscores the stakes and, to some insiders, provides a measure of hope. Liang Qiang is a standing member of the All-China Financial Youth Federation, widely seen as a pipeline to groom future leaders for financial SOEs. Liang, who arrived at Huarong last week and will soon take on the role of president, has worked for the three other big state asset managers that were established, like Huarong, to help clean up bad debts at the nations banks. Some speculate this points to a wider plan: that Huarong might be used as a blueprint for how authorities approach these other sprawling, debt-ridden institutions.Meantime, inside Huarong Tower, a key item remains fixed in the busy schedules of top executives and rank-and-file employees alike. It is a monthly meeting, the topic of which is considered vital to Huarongs rebirth: studying the doctrines of the Chinese Communist Party and speeches of President Xi Jinping. (Updates to mention Caixin managing editors opinion piece on the matter. )More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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What Does Neuroscience Have To Do With Exercise? A Lot According To Cyborggainz: A New Way Of Thinking About Well Rounded Fitness - Yahoo Finance

Neuroscience

Mice licking could reveal mysteries of the human brain | Cornell Chronicle – Cornell Chronicle

Every time we reach for a cup, our brains must assess our hands current position in relation to the mug and then command muscles to make the proper adjustments to successfully grab the handle.

The neuroscience of reaching for something and making on-the-spot adjustments has been studied for a century in monkeys.

But now, for the first time, Cornell researchers have developed a technique for studying such motor control in mice by focusing on a mouses tongue when it licks a water spout.

The technique incorporates high-speed cameras and machine learning in a tractable experimental setup that opens the door for revealing mysteries of how the motor cortex works, understanding the neural basis of related disorders like Parkinsons disease, and informing robotics.

We now have an approach in a mouse where we can bring all the tools of modern neuroscience to bear on this really classic problem of motor control, said Jesse Goldberg, associate professor and Robert R. Capranica Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

Goldberg is senior author of the paper, Cortex-dependent corrections as the tongue reaches for, and misses, targets, published May 19 in Nature. Tejapratap Bollu, Ph.D. 20, a former graduate student in Goldbergs lab and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute, and Brendan Ito, a graduate student in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, are the papers co-first authors.

The field of motor control neuroscience has made advancements almost entirely through studies of monkeys reaching for things, Goldberg said. His lab tried for years to develop a mouse model for much faster and more malleable experiments, but found too many constraints in getting mice to reach with their limbs; mice lack the necessary biomechanics and nature for such movements.

Bollu, who was working on a different project that involved mice licking a water spout, made a discovery that led to the new technique. The water spouts were fitted with contact sensors, but often, the tongue would miss the target.

Bollu noticed with his careful eyes that [the mice] were actually sticking their tongues out and looking for the spout, rather than licking as had been assumed, Goldberg said. The movement in mice, which occurs on time scales of close to 100 milliseconds per lick, is analogous to a monkey reaching and making adjustments with its hand, and activates the motor cortex in a surprisingly similar manner, the researchers found.

During a casual conversation between Bollu and co-author Sam Whitehead, a graduate student in the lab of Itai Cohen, professor of physics in A&S, Whitehead suggested they use high-speed cameras to better observe the movements of the mouse tongues. Then, undergraduate co-author James Redd 18 helped devise an artificial neural network to sift through terabytes of data from millions of image frames to isolate and track the tongue.

With their system in place, the researchers could observe the tongue reaching for the water spout, just as a human reaches for an object. They could also move the water spout, which forced a miss and an immediate correction. At the same time, genetically engineered mice allowed the researchers to use light to turn different parts of the brain on and off while the animals were drinking.

They inactivated the part of the brain, the anterolateral motor cortex, known to be important for online corrections when a primate reaches.

We observed that the mice could still lick when they could not make these online corrections, but they missed the spout, Goldberg said. That part of the brain was not required to generate a lick, but it was required to contact the spout.

The researchers were able to use brain activation experiments to zoom in on the anterolateral motor cortex. The electrical signals there exhibited remarkable similarity to the types of electrical signals people observed in primate reach tasks, Goldberg said.

Now we can do experiments that have never been done before, he said.

Cornell Neurotech has developed technologies that make it possible to record thousands of neurons in an animal at once, for example. In next steps, Goldberg plans to use these tools to characterize for the first time the origins of pathogenic brain signals in neurological disorders, such as Parkinsons disease.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, Jean Sheng '77, Kent Sheng '78, the Klingenstein Neuroscience Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

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Mice licking could reveal mysteries of the human brain | Cornell Chronicle - Cornell Chronicle

Neuroscience

Anesthesia Doesn’t Simply Turn Off the Brain It Dramatically Changes and Controls Its Rhythms – SciTechDaily

Researchers measured how strongly brain waves were synchronized before, during, and after anesthesia with propofol. Data from the research shows strong increases in synchrony only in very slow frequencies (deep red color along bottom) between the thalamus and four cortical regions while animals were unconscious. Credit: Image courtesy of the Miller/Brown labs, Picower Institute

Simultaneous measurement of neural rhythms and spikes across five brain areas reveals how propofol induces unconsciousness.

In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brains normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels, waking the brain back up and restoring arousal.

Theres a folk psychology or tacit assumption that what anesthesia does is simply turn off the brain, says Earl Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and co-senior author of the study in eLife. What we show is that propofol dramatically changes and controls the dynamics of the brains rhythms.

Conscious functions, such as perception and cognition, depend on coordinated brain communication, in particular between the thalamus and the brains surface regions, or cortex, in a variety of frequency bands ranging from 4 to 100 hertz. Propofol, the study shows, seems to bring coordination among the thalamus and cortical regions down to frequencies around just 1 hertz.

Millers lab, led by postdoc Andre Bastos and former graduate student Jacob Donoghue, collaborated with that of co-senior author Emery N. Brown, who is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. The collaboration therefore unified the Miller labs expertise on how neural rhythms coordinate the cortex to produce conscious brain function with the Brown labs expertise in the neuroscience of anesthesia and statistical analysis of neural signals.

Brown says studies that show how anesthetics change brain rhythms can directly improve patient safety because these rhythms are readily visible on the EEG in the operating room. The studys main finding of a signature of very slow rhythms across the cortex offers a model for directly measuring when subjects have entered unconsciousness after propofol administration, how deeply they are being maintained in that state, and how quickly they may wake up once propofol dosing ends.

Anesthesiologists can use this as a way to better take care of patients, Brown says.

Brown has long studied how brain rhythms are affected in humans under general anesthesia by making and analyzing measurements of rhythms using scalp EEG electrodes and, to a limited extent, cortical electrodes in epilepsy patients. Because the new study was conducted in animal models of those dynamics, the team was able to implant electrodes that could directly measure the activity or spiking of many individual neurons and rhythms in the cortex and thalamus. Brown said the results therefore significantly deepen and extend his findings in people.

For instance, the same neurons that they measured chattering away with spikes of voltage 7-10 times a second during wakefulness routinely fired only once a second or less during propofol-induced unconsciousness, a notable slowing called a down state. In all, the scientists made detailed simultaneous measurements of rhythms and spikes in five regions: two in the front of the cortex, two toward the back, and the thalamus.

Whats so compelling is we are getting data down to the level of spikes, Brown says. The slow oscillations modulate the spiking activity across large parts of the cortex.

As much as the study explains how propofol generates unconsciousness, it also helps to explain the unified experience of consciousness, Miller says.

All the cortex has to be on the same page to produce consciousness, Miller says. One theory about how this works is through thalamo-cortical loops that allow the cortex to synchronize. Propofol may be breaking the normal operation of those loops by hyper synchronizing them in prolonged down states. It disrupts the ability of the cortex to communicate.

For instance, by making measurements in distinct layers of the cortex, the team found that higher-frequency gamma rhythms, which are normally associated with new sensory information like sights and sounds, were especially reduced in superficial layers. Lower-frequency alpha and beta waves, which Miller has shown tend to regulate the processing of the information carried by gamma rhythms, were especially reduced in deeper layers.

In addition to the prevailing synchrony at very slow frequencies, the team noted other signatures of unconsciousness in the data. As Brown and others have observed in humans before, alpha and beta rhythm power was notably higher in posterior regions of the cortex during wakefulness, but after loss of consciousness power at those rhythms flipped to being much higher in anterior regions.

The team further showed that stimulating the thalamus with a high-frequency pulse of current (180 hertz) undid propofols effects.

Stimulation produced an awake-like cortical state by increasing spiking rates and decreasing slow-frequency power, the authors wrote in the study. In all areas, there was a significant increase in spiking during the stimulation interval compared to pre-stimulation baseline.

Reference: Neural effects of propofol-induced unconsciousness and its reversal using thalamic stimulation by Andr M Bastos, Jacob A Donoghue, Scott L Brincat, Meredith Mahnke, Jorge Yanar, Josefina Correa, Ayan S Waite, Mikael Lundqvist, Jefferson Roy, Emery N Brown and Earl K Miller, 27 April 2021, eLife.DOI: 10.7554/eLife.60824

In addition to Miller, Brown, Bastos and Donoghue, the papers other authors are Scott Brincat, Meredith Mahnke, Jorge Yanar, Josefina Correa, Ayan Waite, Mikael Lundqvist, and Jefferson Roy.

The National Institutes of Health and the JPB Foundation provided funding for the study.

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Anesthesia Doesn't Simply Turn Off the Brain It Dramatically Changes and Controls Its Rhythms - SciTechDaily

Neuroscience

What happens in the brain when we imagine the future? | Penn Today – Penn Today

In quiet moments, the brain likes to wanderto the events of tomorrow, an unpaid bill, an upcoming vacation.

Despite little external stimulation in these instances, a part of the brain called the default mode network (DMN) is hard at work. These regions seem to be active when people arent asked to do anything in particular, as opposed to being asked to do something cognitively, says Penn neuroscientist Joseph Kable.

Though the field has long suspected that this neural network plays a role in imagining the future, precisely how it works hadnt been fully understood. Now, research from Kable and two former graduate students in his lab, Trishala Parthasarathi, associate director of scientific services at OrtleyBio, and Sangil Lee, a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, sheds light on the matter.

In a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the research team discovered that, when it comes to imagining the future, the default mode network actually splits into two complementary parts. One helps create and predict the imagined event, what the researchers call the constructive function. The other assesses whether that newly constructed event is positive or negative, what they call the evaluative function.

Its a neat division, says Kable. When psychologists talk about why humans have the ability to imagine the future, usually its so we can decide what to do, plan, make decisions. But a critical function is the evaluative function; its not just about coming up with a possibility but also evaluating it as good or bad.

The DMN itself includes the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and regions in the medial temporal and parietal lobes, such as the hippocampus. Its aptly named, Kable says. When you put people into a brain scanner and ask them to not do anything, to just sit there, these are the brain regions that seem to be active, he says.

Previous research had revealed which areas make up the DMN and that constructing and evaluating imagined events activates different components. Kable wanted to test that idea further, to better pinpoint the implicated regions and whats happening in each.

To do so, he and his team created a study in which 13 females and 11 males received prompts while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Participants had seven seconds to read one of 32 cues such as, Imagine youre sitting on a warm beach on a tropical island, or Imagine you win the lottery next year. They then had 12 seconds to think about the scenario, followed by 14 seconds to rate vividness and valence.

Vividness is the degree to which the image that comes to mind has a lot of details and how much those details subjectively pop as opposed to being vague, Kable says. Valence is an emotional evaluation. How positive or negative is the event? Is this something you want to have happen or not?

When psychologists talk about why humans have the ability to imagine the future, usually its so we can decide what to do, plan, make decisions. But a critical function is the evaluative function. Neuroscientist Joseph Kable

Participants went through the process four times. Each time, the Penn researchers watched brain activity from the fMRI. The work confirmed two sub-networks at play.

One network, which well call the dorsal default mode network, was influenced by valence. In other words, it was more active for positive events than for negative events, but it was not influenced at all by vividness. It seems to be involved in the evaluative function, Kable says.

The other sub-network, the ventral default mode network, was more active for highly vivid events than for events with no detail. But it wasnt influenced by valence, he says. It was equally active for both positive and negative events, showing that network really is involved in the construction piece of imagination.

According to Kable, the findings offer a first step toward understanding the basis of imaginative abilities. This research asked participants to evaluate the positivity or negativity of an imagined event, but more complex assessmentsmoving beyond the simple good-versus-bad dimension, for instancemight offer further clues about this neural process.

That kind of analysis will likely comprise future work for the Kable lab, which has already begun using these findings to parse why people dont value future outcomes as much as immediate outcomes.

One theory is that the future isnt as vivid, isnt as tangible and detailed and concrete as something right in front of your face, he says. Weve started to use our identification of the sub-network involved in construction to ask the question, how active is this network when people are thinking about future outcomes compared to the same outcome in the present.

And although the research was completed before COVID-19, Kable sees pandemic-related implications for these findings. Before the pandemic hit, if you had described what someones life was going to be like to themyoure going to work from home and wear a mask every time you go outside and not engage in any social contactit would blow their mind. And yet, once we have the actual experiences, its no longer so strange. For me, this demonstrates that we still have far to go in understanding our imaginative capabilities.

Funding for this research came from the National Institute of Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health (Grant R01 DA029149).

Joseph Kable is the Baird Term Professor in the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also director of MindCORE, Penns hub for the integrative study of the mind.

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What happens in the brain when we imagine the future? | Penn Today - Penn Today

Neuroscience

Psychiatry and the Long View: Paul Summergrad, MD – Psychiatric Times

Paul Summergrad, MD, is the Dr Frances S. Arkin professor and chairman of the department of psychiatry, professor of psychiatry and medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and psychiatrist-in-chief at Tufts Medical Center. Dr Summergrad served as the 141st president of the American Psychiatric Association from 2014 to 2015. He is also a past president of the American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry and is Secretary for Finances of the World Psychiatric Association and a member of the WPA executive committee. Dr Summergrads research focuses on mood disorders, medical-psychiatric comorbidity, and health system design. He received the Distinguished Faculty Award from Tufts University School of Medicine in 2015 and the Leadership award of the American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry in 2018. He was elected to the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, their highest honor, in 2020. He is the lead editor of the Textbook of Medical Psychiatry (2020, American Psychiatric Association Publishing).

In many ways, Dr Summergrad exemplifies the best of psychiatric leadership. He has a charismatic and warm persona, an in-depth knowledge of psychiatrys history, an appreciation of its pluralistic roots in medicine as well as psychoanalysis, and a preference for taking the long view of psychiatrys development as a field. I was pleased to be able to speak to Dr Summergrad about his intellectual development, his views on psychiatrys identity, and the challenges facing the medical model and psychiatric classification.

Aftab: Perhaps we can begin with the trajectory of your intellectual and philosophical understanding of psychiatry, particularly how you have navigated the psychoanalytic as well as neuroscientific aspects of psychiatry over the course of your career?

Summergrad: I have been thinking a lot about this, and I do not know that I can separate any of this from certain cardinal experiences of my life. So, I think we will have to take a little detour into my life story and how I entered medicine and psychiatry.

I am a child of the 60s in the sense that I was in college during the 60s. That was an extremely disruptive time in American history for a variety of reasons, and it became a disruptive time in my own life as well. I had been interested in psychiatry well before that, probably since I was 14 or 15 years old. For some reason, I was just pulled towards psychiatry. Maybe it was because I read Civilizations and its Discontents in high school, or because I had also worked at a camp run by a Jewish social welfare organization. There was a cohort of kids at the camp who had emotional and social difficulties. As part of that experience, we learned a bit about how to work with kids who had emotional difficulties, and that also reinforced my interest in psychiatry.

I started college in 1967. Looking back on it, I doubt that I was clinically depressed, but it was definitely an emotionally turbulent period of my life. I was significantly thrown off both by where I was living as well as by my living circumstances. I hated Buffalo and its winters. Going outside in the winter there seemed like crossing Siberia to a New York City native. I was not really prepared for it. And I was a freshmen male living in gender segregated rental housing off campus. During that year, I took a course on the Dhammapada, which as you know is one of the foundational texts of Buddhism. I was very much drawn to that course, as well as to another course on Chinese history, but otherwise I felt very disconnected from school. Like probably a lot of other college students at that time, I started smoking cannabis. In the spring of that year, I took LSDI am certainly not advocating for the casual use of psychedelics or cannabis hereand I had a profoundly religious experience. It was as if I had been dropped into Nirvana, perfection, holiness, oneness. It was a deeply mystical experience, and it also changed my thinking about the self. It made me think a lot about neurobiology and consciousness, because if a tiny dose of a drug like this could change ones perception so profoundly, what did that mean regarding how we understand the mind-brain relationship, and relevant to psychiatry, the etiology of mental illness?

Partly as a result of that, I then went on to study Zen Buddhism and considered training as a Buddhist monk. I ended up spending a couple of years doing very intensive Zen Buddhist meditation at a training center in Rochester, New York. There was no drug use of any kind and a fairly ascetic lifestyle. Towards the end of that period, I spent a year in a self-imposed isolation, in a liminal state, because I really felt that I needed to cut out the external messages of the dominant culture to discover what I really wanted to be and do. At the end of this period, I had a couple of important dreams and one of the dreams was extraordinarily powerful, a great dream in the Jungian sense, which basically resolved my dilemma. I woke up and my crisis was over. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how to integrate the various strands of my life. I knew I wanted to go to medical school and to likely become a psychiatrist.

In medical school it turned out that I really liked medicine, and I ended up training in internal medicine for 3 years before I trained in psychiatry. The medical training left a deep influence. I was impacted by being in a medical setting where neuropsychiatric conditions were among the most common admitting diagnoses. When I was an intern, probably a third of the admissions to the medical service were due to altered mental status. I realized that in practically every rotation, the only thing I really cared about was the neuropsychiatric consequences of the medical conditions I was studying. So, I really could no longer resist the siren song of psychiatry, but I was impacted by my medical training, such that for me, the boundary between medicine and psychiatry has always been very porous.

Aftab: What sort of notion of psychiatry did you have at that time, and how was it influenced by your earlier mystical and meditative experiences?

Summergrad: My sense of psychiatry was in part tied to depth psychology and psychoanalysis. Given my Jewish background, and given Freuds own cultural Jewish identification, there was a pull towards psychoanalysis from a cultural standpoint, but there was also a pull towards it as being somehow central to psychiatry. Depth psychology provided me with a way to merge my experiences with dreams, meditation, and psychedelics with my interests in medicine and science.

I went on to undertake psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Despite my psychoanalytic training, I thought psychiatry had to be profoundly anchored in medicine, and by medicine I am broadly including here internal medicine, neurology, as well as the neurosciences. For my residency I went to the most medically oriented psychiatric program in the United States, which was Massachusetts General Hospital. Tom Hackett, MD, was the chief there when I was a trainee. His view was that if psychiatry was not anchored in medicine, it was kind of homeless, from a clinical as well as operational standpoint, and I agree with that. I think it is unfortunate that a lot of the time as psychiatrists we end up giving away our connection to the rest of medicine and neurology. The other side of it is the risk that we may justify our existence as physicians by overvaluing what seemed to me to be a narrower biological psychiatry. I think if we were more secure in our relationship with medicine, we might not see quite this tension within the profession.

Aftab: How did you reconcile psychoanalysis and neuroscience in your mind?

Summergrad: Early in his career, prior to the development of psychoanalysis, Freud wrote a book called The Project for a Scientific Psychology, which was officially published in 1950, well after his death. I felt that my interests in neurobiology and psychology came together in The Project for a Scientific Psychology and to some degree The Interpretation of Dreams which mirrors, especially in its critical seventh, metapsychological chapter, The Project. Freud was really struggling with how to place his interest in depth psychology in the context of the burgeoning neurobiology of the late 19th century. The late 19th century was a fertile period: the neuron doctrine was being established. Ramn y Cajal, MD, produced his first drawings of neurons around that time. Freud attempts in The Project to use what he understood as the accepted neurobiological model and tried talk about how this whole apparatus works to generate mental states. I thought that he engaged with that issue in that book in a much more profound way than psychoanalysis has subsequently. Freud was severely limited by the neuroscience of his times, but he was convinced that a scientific explanation of psychological phenomena in terms of neurobiological phenomena was possible. He basically thought of psychologic states in parallel to the physiology of the brain that, while separate, they were dependent concomitants,1 and I think this central idea provides a potential means of reconciliation.

Aftab: In the mid-20th century, the psychiatrist Erwin Stengel, MD, was commissioned by the World Health Organization to review existing psychiatric classifications. He noted in his 1959 report2:

This description strikes me as quite applicable to our own times. The controversy surrounding the development of DSM-5 and the on-going search for alternative classification frameworks reveals just how deep the dissatisfaction is. What are your thoughts on why attitudes towards classification continue to be ambivalent in the psychiatric community, and what do you see as the path forward?

Summergrad: The dynamic as described by Stengel does seem to exist. I think that we tend to get into a lot of unnecessary battles around classification, regarding how we classify and what we classify, as if these were not constructs imposed on real conditions. It is not that psychiatric disorders are not real. They are terribly real. All you need to do is take care of someone who is experiencing a severe episode of mania or catatonia, to know that they are profoundly and powerfully real. I tend to see psychiatric classification as more of a tentative and open-ended iterative process, subject to revision by evolving data and models of disorders. . This is a difficult task, as you know, we are dealing with things at multiple levels of observation. Take Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), for example. Even if you are going to use RDoC to do a research study, you still need to select and study a group of patients using some form of clinical categorization, whether it is something broad as mood disorders, or specific symptoms such as anhedonia, etc. There was recognition in the 1960s and 1970s, by the group of psychiatrists at Washington University in St. Louis as well as Robert Spitzer, MD, and colleagues that there needed to be some operational criteria to ensure reliability of observations. This recognition emerged in the context of many studies which had showed the poor reliability of various diagnoses at the time, such as the differences between the diagnoses of bipolar disorder vs schizophrenia in the United Kingdom and the United States.3

I think the development of our current nosologies in the 1970s was an understandable reaction against a lack of scientific rigor, at least around reliability. It starts becoming a problem when the operational constructs become reified as real, as valid. This will be relevant to our discussion regarding the medical model as well, because mental disorders are profoundly personal and intimate, and they affect ones deepest sense of who one is. A psychiatric diagnosis can be heard as somebody saying that it is as if your intrinsic being is somehow medically defective or genetically defective; it is not just that your body is diseased, but that you are diseased, with the implication that you may be unchangeable.

Tensions emerge from well-reasoned and well-intentioned attempts to get closer to the truth about the causes, etiologies, and the treatments of disorders. I think that to a great extent, our diagnostic systems, whether it is DSM or ICD, have been helpful with regards to clinical practice and research, in allowing us to do systematized studies, because after all, we want to know whether the interventions are actually going to help somebody or not. We want to know with some degree of medical certainty whether we can recommend electroconvulsive therapy for the treatment of catatonia or for certain kinds of major depression, or whether we can or cannot recommend antidepressants for individuals who have bipolar depression. We cannot do that, we cannot really tell whether we are going to help patients or hurt them, unless we utilize reliable categories. These practical considerations are one of our primary obligations.

Again, I think that we struggle with this in part because the problem is so difficult, philosophically and intellectually, because it relates to the very things that we experience as the most intimate parts of ourselves, and also because we do not fully understand how the brain and the mind interrelate and interact. In fact, setting these difficulties aside, even if you look at general medicine, things are bit more clear-cut, but a large number of patients who present to general medical clinics have medically unexplained symptoms or they remain undiagnosed in terms of etiology. So, things are not always straightforward in rest of medicine either.

Aftab: The impression I get from your description of classification is that we need to take it a little less seriously. That we need enough that we can do our practical and scientific work with some structure and reliability, but it becomes problematic when we start to ascribe metaphysical importance to these operational constructs.

Summergrad: Yes, that is right. When we reify these categories, we almost make them unchangeable objects. In order to begin to approximate validity, we need to be able to formulate hypotheses and then test them, and the only way we can do so is if we begin with some reliable way of describing the phenomena. Our diagnostic categories and our rating scales have a lot of limitations. We are relying on self-report, communications, physician observations. So, we always have to approach them with some degree of humility.

Aftab: Going back to your personal experience, when you were 18 years old and in that phase of emotional and existential turmoil, someone could very well have suggested that you were suffering from clinical depression and that you needed to see a psychiatrist. How do you think you would have reacted to that?

Summergrad: In fact, I did get that message. That I was clinically depressed, and that I just needed to see a psychiatrist and be on the right antidepressant, and all of this would go away. I strongly rejected that message. The very last thing I was going to do at that time was to go see a psychiatrist. So, I understand where some of this resistance against the so-called medical model comes from.

If you had taken me at age 18 or 19, and had tried to look at my experiences at that time through the lens of a diagnostic or medical model, I would have agreed with the critics that the medical model was not the best frame for this. But if I had had to drop out of school because of intrusive obsessional thoughts or compulsions that may be quite different, and the medical model is in my view an appropriate frame of inquiry. Or perhaps I just do not have an accurate view of my 18-year-old self. I think that one critique of the medical model, as it is understood by many, is driven by a concern that we are judging individuals, pushing them away, not listening to their experience, and distancing ourselves from them by labeling them. We always have an obligation to listen and to be prepared to revise our thinking,

Aftab: The medical model in psychiatry is facing considerable opposition from many prominent critics. How to best understand the medical model is a complex issue, something we briefly touched on in your interview for Current Psychiatry,4 and in this series I have talked about the medical model in detail with Dr Huda.5 A question I would like to ask you is about the limits of the medical model. The concern around medicalization reflects a growing anxiety that more and more of our lives are being viewed through the medical gaze. It is perhaps to be expected that as medical practitioners we tend to focus on the ways in which the medical model can improve lives, but at what point does medicine say to itself, Maybe we are not the best professionals to address this. Maybe this is a situation where we should let our colleagues in psychology and social work take the lead. Maybe this is a situation where the medical understanding of a condition should not dominate over or should not exclude a more psychological, social, or existential understanding of the phenomenon? How can medicine be more reflective over its own limits and boundaries?

Summergrad: Everything depends on what we mean by the medical model. To me, in its most basic form, the medical model is a hypothesis-generating method, the roots of which can be traced back to Thomas Sydenham, MD, among others. The basic idea is that there are signs and symptoms that assort together more likely than would be expected by chance, and we recognize them as syndromes. If we properly define what the syndrome is, we can begin to then investigate what causes it and how to treat it. This is an incredibly fertile thread that runs through all of medicine. This is the sort of thinking that serves as the foundation for Robert Koch, MDs postulates or Rudolf Virchow, MDs pathological studies. It is a syndromic model, which leads to a hypothesis, which leads to investigation, and then the results of these investigations may force us to redefine our syndromes or redefine our hypothesis, so it is an iterative process as well. In this iterative process, diagnoses can be lumped together, or they may be split further, or rearranged in other unique ways. The syndromes are intended to have parsimonious explanations, to achieve as Einstein said at Oxford in 1933, the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible.6

When individuals use the term medical model in psychiatry, I think what they mean is that psychiatrists are ascribing a medical cause to an individuals experience or feelings. So when we, as psychiatrists, ascribe a medical cause to the feelings and experiences, we are referring to some ineluctable and unchangeable element about the individual, with the implication that their very essence is dysfunctional or pathological. That is, in my view, a mistaken understanding.

Do I believe that some of the experiences in the realm of psychic suffering are better understood as existential rather than medical? Absolutely, I do. I do not believe that every form of mental suffering or emotional suffering is a mental disorder, but do I believe that there are mental disorders which are best understood through the syndromic lens. DSM is a variant of this syndromic model, and it is a very useful tool to categorize mental disorders, a tool that also provides us with ways to validate our constructs, with validators such as course of illness, family history, genetics, biology, and a variety of other things that have been well-described by Ken Kendler, MD, among others. These validators help us put some guardrails around what we are postulating through the syndromic lens.

Aftab: I think the thing that concerns or worries many critics is that when something is viewed through that syndromic lens it tends to crowd out other ways of understanding it.

Summergrad: It is an important worry, but it is not a necessary consequence of the syndromic view. Do all human experiences fall within the realm of medicine or psychiatry? I do not think they do, or that they should. I think that would be a mistake. In other words, there is definitely a risk that our diagnostic concepts can be over-extended and that everyday life can be medicalized. That is something we have to guard against.

I do think we have both an obligation to say, this is our best evidence of what is effective for this kind of entity, and an obligation to recognize that not all emotional or mental states are best understood through this syndromic medical model. Neither the profession nor the general public is well-served by medicalizing ordinary human experience. It also does not mean that psychotherapy cannot be beneficial for developmental or existential concerns. It can be. Freud viewed the goal of psychoanalysis as converting neurotic misery into common unhappiness.7 The challenge we face is not to convert human unhappiness, what my Buddhist teachers would call, in the Pali Canon, Dukkha, into a psychiatric illness.

Aftab: I really liked something you said in your presidential address to the APA8:

It seems to me that the discourse in psychiatry has tended to fluctuate between extremes of enthusiasm and disillusionment, with this cycle repeating every 30 to 50 years. Do you think adopting the long view can help us avoid getting trapped in this cycle?

Summergrad: Part of the reason why I think the long view is useful is that it allows you to see the changes that have actually happened. If we are too close to the events in question, it is hard to know whether meaningful or long-lasting change has taken place or not. I think if you take the long-view, the comfort that exists in contemporary culture with regards to talking about mental illness, the protections that exist within law, the reimbursement of care from insurance companies for psychiatric conditions (imperfect as it is), and the increased awareness regarding human rights in psychiatric care, all of those things to me represent advances in the course of history, but you cannot see them if you are too close to them. There is this story of Henry Kissinger, PhD, meeting with Zhou Enlai, the great Chinese prime minister, during the opening to China in the early 1970s. The story goes that they were making small talk before the visit and Kissinger asked Zhou, What do you think of the impact of the French Revolution? Zhou paused, and replied, Too soon to tell. I think that captures well my own sentiments.

Aftab: Speaking of the long view, in a 2013 editorial for World Psychiatry, on the 100th anniversary of Karl Jaspers, MDs General Psychopathology; Mario Maj, MD, PhD, commented on the analogies between Jaspers historical context and our own. He wrote9:

Your thoughts on this?

Summergrad: I do think that eventually we will learn a lot more about the organization and the functioning of the brain: how it works, not just at the genetic or the cellular level but also at the circuitry level, such that we would begin to link the activity of the brain circuits with certain states of mind. We can already do that to some degree already, but we will be able to do it better, with more precision and explanatory power.

That is not to say that everything can be or should be explained by neurobiology. You know, again, one of the implications of my psychedelic experience for me has been that it is hard to think about these issues with our current limited understanding of the mind-body problem.

A difference between where we are now and where we were a hundred years ago is that the late 19th century, early 20th century was kind of the end of that neuroscience period. Alois Alzheimer, MD, was born in 1864 and died in 1915. Emil Kraepelin, MD, was born in 1856, the same year as Freud. The neuropathological work that the generation of Alzheimer and Kraepelin were doing peaked in the late 19th century and early 20th century in terms of its effects on psychiatry. The discovery of plaques and tangles in dementia, or the work arounds tertiary syphilis, for example. Neuroscience obviously continued on in the next decades, but its impact on psychiatry was very limited. In contrast, I think we are in a period now where the current wave of neuroscientific research is still offering more and more fertile hypotheses and lines of inquiry. For example, all the research going on around immunological and inflammatory processes in psychiatric disorders. It may turn out to be right or wrong, we do not know, but my timeframe to think about these things is more like 50 years, not 10 or 20 years.

Aftab: Any message for psychiatric trainees and early career psychiatrists?

Summergrad: First of all, I think we are in a fabulous time for psychiatry. The number of US medical school graduates going into psychiatry has nearly doubled over the last 7 years. No other major specialty has seen such a large growth of new recruits. The field has enormous flexibility, richness, and breadth of interests. The stigma around mental disorders is going down and there is greater public discussion about mental health. One only has to look at the discussions related to mental health around the COVID-19 pandemic. This emphasis on mental health is really quite unprecedented.

We never know how our lives and careers are going to work out for us as individuals. If somebody had told me when I was a first-year resident in psychiatry at Harvard that I would become the president of the American Psychiatric Association, I would have laughed. I expect that our trainees will accomplish even greater things. Not only psychiatry trainees should have confidence in the field and in themselves, but their mentors should also have confidence in them. There is a great episode of The West Wing that I quoted in my presidential address.8

President Bartlet is played by Martin Sheen and his communications aide, Sam Seaborn by Rob Lowe. They are playing chess while at the same time Bartlet is navigating a complex China-Taiwan diplomatic crisis. Sam is amazed and asks him how he does it. Bartlet answers, You have a lot of help. You listen to everybody and then you call the play. [Rises to his feet] Sam, youre gonna run for President one day. Dont be scared. You can do it. I believe in you. [Looks at the board] Thats checkmate.

So, that is kind of what I am saying to you, and to trainees who are younger than you: I believe in you, and I think that you can do amazing things. Not that I know about anybodys individual future, but I can see that our trainees and younger psychiatrists such as yourself are going to have an impact on the field and the world around them. And that is a great thing, and you should feel confident that you have the ability to make a difference, and to do that in a way that is respectful of others, even those who are critical of the field.

Aftab: Thank you!

The opinions expressed in the interviews are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Psychiatric TimesTM.

Dr Aftab is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio, and clinical assistant professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. He is a member of the executive council of Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry and has been actively involved in initiatives to educate psychiatrists and trainees on the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. He is also a member of the Psychiatric TimesTM Advisory Board. He can be reached at awaisaftab@gmail.com or on twitter @awaisaftab.

Dr Aftab and Dr Summergrad have no relevant financial disclosures or conflicts of interest.

References

1. Freud S. The Unconscious. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth Press; 1915. Volume 14:159-204.

2. Stengel E. Classification of mental disorders. Bull World Health Organ.1959;21(4-5):601-63.

3. Kendell RE, Cooper JE, Gourlay AJ, et al. Diagnostic criteria of American and British psychiatrists. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1971;25(2):123-130.

4. Aftab A, Summergrad P. Paul Summergrad, MD, on the state of psychiatry. Current Psychiatry. 2021;20(1):30-3.

5. Aftab A. The Medical Model in Theory and Practice: Ahmed Samei Huda. Psychiatric Times. September 4, 2020. Accessed May 18, 2021.

6. Einstein A. On the Method of Theoretical Physics. The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford, 10 June 1933. Clarendon Press; 1933.

7. Breuer J, Freud S. Studies in Hysteria. Trans. Nicola Luckhurst. Penguin Classics, 2004.

8. Summergrad P. The Long View. Am J Psychiatry. 2015;172(8):714-716.

9. Maj M. Mental disorders as "brain diseases" and Jaspers' legacy.World Psychiatry. 2013;12(1):1-3.

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Psychiatry and the Long View: Paul Summergrad, MD - Psychiatric Times

Neuroscience

Neuroscientist Wins NIH Fellowship, Shines as Researcher, Mentor – University of Texas at Dallas

Dr. Lakeisha Lewter

Dr. Lakeisha Lewter intends to light the way for the next generation of scientists on the path she traveled.

The neuroscience research associate in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) at The University of Texas at Dallas received a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. The postdoctoral fellowship will fund her pain research for the next three years.

Lewters passion for her research is matched by her dedication to serving underrepresented populations, a desire that comes from her own life story.

Growing up in Laurel, Maryland, Lewter attended a high school with an international baccalaureate program, which she credits with teaching her how to think independently and critically two important components of being a researcher, she said. And yet, she felt there was something lacking in her educational environment.

I attended majority-white institutions my whole life. I felt a loss of identity; it had been hard fitting in, she said. I grew up watching A Different World, based on a fictional HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities], and I thought it would be nice to be in a space where I wasnt the only person who looked like me.

Although her guidance counselors pushed her in other directions, Lewter said she knew in her heart where she wanted to be. She followed her older sister to Morgan State University, a public HBCU in Baltimore.

Winding up at Morgan State is what got me on the track of being a researcher, Lewter said.

Her sister played a role in that, too, telling Lewter, then a freshman biology student, about the Minority Biomedical Research Support Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (MBRS-RISE) program, a paid research opportunity for undergraduates. She jumped at the opportunity.

I started during my second semester. That following summer, they gave me my own project, and I fell in love with research doing experiments, interpreting results, answering questions and developing more questions, Lewter said.

Dr. Lewter is an outstanding researcher, teacher and mentor. Folks come to her for her expertise and ability to thoughtfully process their situation.

Dr. Benedict Kolber, associate professor of neuroscience in the UTDallas Center for Advanced Pain Studies

As an undergraduate, Lewter focused on aspects of neuroscience, including mental health disorders and later on behavioral pharmacology. While obtaining her doctorate from the University of Buffalo, she moved into pain research, specifically studying the potential utility of novel compounds for pain control. For her postdoctoral position, she sought a chance to learn a new skill set. Thats how she found Dr. Benedict Kolber, now an associate professor of neuroscience in the UTDallas Center for Advanced Pain Studies, who was at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh at the time.

Dr. Lewter is an outstanding researcher, teacher and mentor. I knew when she first interviewed with the laboratory that she would both fit into our existing community and also make it better, said Kolber, who joined UTDallas in 2020. Folks come to her for her expertise and ability to thoughtfully process their situation.

When Kolber left Duquesne for UTDallas, Lewter an avowed East Coast girl made the cross-country jump as well.

He takes time out to train his mentees. He pushes you, but not unreasonably so, she said of Kolber. I enjoy my work, and a large part of that is because hes a great supervisor. Ultimately, thats why I decided to come to Dallas, even though Id just arrived in Pittsburgh.

Lewters fellowship work will continue to explore the origins of urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome. She is examining how changes in one region of the brain may cause the persistent condition.

Pain is so complex, with different modalities and different types, she said. Earlier work determined that in neuropathic pain, theres a change in dominance of the amygdala several days after the event, from left to right, as pain transitions from acute to chronic. Were going to see if thats also true in visceral bladder pain. Were also exploring if the receptors for calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) have similar dimorphic effects.

Kolber said Lewters research is opening up new technical innovations for our investigation of the brain in the context of visceral bladder pain.

The NIH fellowship that was recently funded is the result of over two years of hard work. Using novel in vivo imaging, Dr. Lewter is trying to tease apart the specific cells in an area of the brain, the amygdala, that can both increase and decrease bladder pain, he added. These biomedical questions will give us insight into human pain disease progression and hopefully treatment. This project will also be a major springboard for her to launch her own independent research career.

When it comes to that eventual career, Lewter has some particular goals in mind.

Plan A is that Id like to be a primary investigator at a minority-serving institution, she said. Representation is important in itself; thats another big thing about my HBCU experience there were so many Black women within the department that had their PhDs, and the RISE program at Morgan State gave me the confidence and skills to pursue my own PhD. Its important to me to foster that environment.

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Neuroscientist Wins NIH Fellowship, Shines as Researcher, Mentor - University of Texas at Dallas

Neuroscience

Novartis loses another NIBR exec as neuro expert Shanker joins a gene therapy biotech – FierceBiotech

Novartis' Gopi Shanker, Ph.D., is the latest R&D leader to exitthe Swiss pharma giant as he takes up the helm of chief scientific officer at gene therapy startup TevardBiosciences.

Shanker follows the exit of Jeff Engelman M.D., Ph.D., who left the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) in late-April to form a new cancer biotech,TreelineBiosciences. Days later, Peter Hammerman, M.D., Ph.D., exitedto start as chief scientific officer of molecular machines biotech MOMA Therapeutics. Both Engelman and Hammerman focused on oncology R&D for the Big Pharma.

RELATED:Novartis loses 2nd oncology R&D exec as Hammerman leaves through the door left open by Engelman

Shanker, who was head of neuroscience at the NIBR,will now lead thetransfer RNA-based gene therapystartups preclinical scientific programs, with an eye to moving these into the clinic.Tevard, focused on gene therapies for rare and severe genetic diseases, will also task Shanker with broadening research into new therapeutic areas.

Gopi brings deep expertise and an impressive track record in translating pioneering science into transformative new therapies," said Daniel Fischer,Tevardco-founder, president and CEO,in a statement.

I shareTevard'spassion and commitment to transforming the lives of patients with serious genetic disorders," Shanker said of his hiring. This now leaves Novartis with another hole in its NIBR research team, as it continues to hemorrhage talent from the unit, which Novartis dubs its "innovation engine."

Shankers appointment comes half a year after the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech entered into a collaboration with Zogenix to seek out and work on gene therapies for Dravet syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy, and other genetic epilepsies. Under that pact, Tevard receives a payment of $10 million and is in line for biobucks worth between $70 million and $100 million for each program.

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Novartis loses another NIBR exec as neuro expert Shanker joins a gene therapy biotech - FierceBiotech

Neuroscience

Doctoral Oral Exams for May 31June 4 | Office of News & Media Relations – UMass News and Media Relations

The graduate dean invites all graduate faculty to attend the final oral examinations for the doctoral candidates.All exams will be held via video conferencing.Contact the department for online meeting information.

Final oral examinations for the doctoral candidates are scheduled as follows:

Camilla Kuo-Dahab, Ph.D., Civil Engineering, Wednesday, June, 2, 1 p.m. Dissertation: Extracellular Polymeric Substances in Oxygenic Photogranules: Investigation of Their Role in Photogranulation in a Hydrostatic Environment. Caitlyn S. Butler, chr.

Nicole Lee, Ph.D., Neuroscience and Behavior, Friday, June 4, 11 a.m. Dissertation: The Role of Reward in Prairie Vole (Microtus Ochrogaster) Peer Relationships. Annaliese Beery, chr.

Eyal Tamir, Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Friday, June 4, noon, Dissertation: Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses of the Bawdy in Jewish Comedy, American and Israeli Perspectives. Don Levine, chr.

Margaux Audett, Ph.D., Molecular and Cellular Biology, Friday, June 4, 1 p.m. Dissertation: Mechanisms of Mitotic Checkpoint Silencing by the Disordered Kinetochore Protein Spc105. Tom Maresca, chr.

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Doctoral Oral Exams for May 31June 4 | Office of News & Media Relations - UMass News and Media Relations

Neuroscience

Scientists Just Proved the Human Brain Can Support an Extra Body Part – Interesting Engineering

You'd never guess it, but a robotic "third thumb" can change the way your hand is represented in your brain, according to a new study published in the journalScience Robotics.

Get ready for cybernetic augmentation.

The research team trained humans to employ a robotic extra thumb and discovered that they could effectively execute complex and dextrous tasks, including building a tower of blocks, using their double-thumbed hand. As participants continued to train, they remarked on how it increasingly felt like just another part of their body.

Called the Third Thumb, the device's development was part of an award-winning graduate project at the Royal College of Art, under the leadership of Designer Dani Clode. The project aimed to change the way we think about prosthetics, from the basics of restoring a lost function to a more modest extension of human capabilities. Clode was subsequently invited to join a team of neuroscientists at the University College London, led by Professor Tamar Makin, who were exploring the ways brains adapt to augmented bodies.

"Body augmentation is a growing field aimed at extending our physical abilities, yet we lack a clear understanding of how our brains can adapt to it," said Makin of the UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and lead author of the study, in an embargoed release shared with IE. "By studying people using Dani's cleverly-designed Third Thumb, we sought to answer key questions around whether the human brain can support an extra body part, and how the technology might impact our brain."

Notably, the Third Thumb is completely 3D-printed, which means customization comes easy. It's worn on the side of the hand, opposite your flesh-and-blood thumb, in proxy to pinky. The wearer of the Third Thumb can control it via pressure sensors equipped on their feet, below the big toes. Wirelessly connected, the two toe sensors manipulate the motion of the robotic Thumb by instantly reacting to subtle changes in the pressure of toe on sensor. The study involved 20 participants who were each trained for five days to use the robotic thumb, often taking the thumb home every day to test it out on daily domestic tasks. In all, the wearers each wore their robotic thumbs for two to six hours every day. This group of robot thumb-wearers was contrasted with another group of 10 control participants who donned a static, unmoving robotic thumb while executing identical training tasks.

The daily lab sessions saw the participants focus their robot thumb training on tasks designed to enhance the cooperation between their hand and the Third Thumb, like single-handedly grabbing multiple balls or wine glasses. In so doing, the participants learned the basic gestures needed to use the thumb quickly, with improved motor control, hand-Thumb coordination, and dexterity directly correlated with training. Eventually, the participants used the Thumb when distracted, whether building a wooden block tower while thinking through a math problem or blindfolded.

"Body augmentation could one day be valuable to society in numerous ways, such as enabling a surgeon to get by without an assistant, or a factory worker to work more efficiently," said Paulina Kieliba of the UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, in the embargoed release. "This line of work could revolutionize the concept of prosthetics, and it could help someone who permanently or temporarily can only use on hand, to do everything with that hand."

"But to get there, we need to continue researching the complicated, interdisciplinary questions of how these devices interact with our brains," added Kieliba. The team scanned participants' brains via an fMRI before and after the training while users moved their individual fingers, with no robotic Third Thumb attached. Crucially, the fMRI detected subtle but substantial changes to how the hand augmented with a robotic thumb was represented in the brain's sensorimotor cortex. Our brains represent each finger in a way distinct from all others, and, after the robotic finger training, the new activity pattern corresponding to each individual finger becomes more similar. These changes in brain activity dissipated a week later in participants, hinting at robotic prosthetics as a short-term solution.

"Our study is the first one investigating the use of an augmentation device outside of a lab," said Kieliba in the embargoed release. "It is the first augmentation study carried over multiple days of prolonged training, and the first to have an untrained comparison group. The success of our study shows the value of neuroscientists working closely together with designers and engineers, to ensure that augmentation devices make the most of our brains' ability to learn and adapt, while also ensuring that augmentation devices can be used safely." The future of human motion will undoubtedly see extensive augmentation with robotic limbs and extensions. While our brains didn't evolve to use more than a typical baby is born with, they are more than capable of adapting, and rising to the task of a cybernetic future.

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Scientists Just Proved the Human Brain Can Support an Extra Body Part - Interesting Engineering

Neuroscience

From a Small Island to a Cutting-edge Lab – Tufts Now

As a first-generation college student from the small island of Guam in the western Pacific, Noell Cho was well into her undergraduate degree before she realized that a career in research was even a possibility.

In high school, a scientific career or a PhD in research wasnt really talked about, Cho says.

Guam, which has a population of around 167,000, didnt have any large research institutes to offer a glimpse of such careers. So when she became interested in biology, studying medicine seemed like the obvious path. I feel like it's a very common story about being a child of immigrants, and especially being a child of Korean American immigrants, Cho explains.

However, along the way, Cho uncovered a passion for neuroscience that eventually led her to a PhD program at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, where she not only conducts cutting-edge research, but is committed to mentoring students as they embark on their own research careers.

Cho first felt a pull towards research during her undergraduate biology labs at Lehigh University. Her interest piqued, she gained more research experience after graduation working as a technician in cancer and immunology labs.

I quickly learned that I really liked being part of something where youre thinking up a project and seeing it through, Cho says. As a premed student it felt like you were in the books, studying things that are tried and true, she adds, whereas in research youre starting from a hypothetical question and tackling that question in such a free way.

Yet it wasnt until Cho began working in a stem cell lab that she realized she wanted to study neuroscienceand, with the mentorship of a female principal investigator, began to envision her own career as a research scientist. That representation and having support from someone who had confidence in me so early on was so impactful, Cho says. It empowered her to pursue a PhD.

At Tufts, Cho joined the lab of Stephen Moss, a professor of neuroscience. The lab studies molecular signaling pathways in the brain that are involved in epilepsy and other neurological disorders. Chos research focuses on a recently identified protein that plays a key role in regulating these pathwaysand may have potential as a drug target.

I am intrigued by what we have come to learn about neural circuitry and how this has informed our approach to studying neurological disease, Cho says.

Cho also serves as a mentor for first-generation college students, Pacific Islanders, and women in sciencesomething that she considers a source of constant inspiration. Everyones experiences are so unique and the things we can learn from each other are ever-expanding, she says.

On campus, she mentors students in her lab and is active in student-led organizations such as Tufts Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (GWiSE) and Tufts Scientists Promoting INclusive Excellence (SPINEs). She is also involved in Boston Universitys Upward Bound Math Science summer program for high schoolers and connects informally with students from Guam attending college in Boston.

When working with studentsespecially those that are the first in their families to attend collegeshe makes an extra effort to teach them the hidden curriculum of unwritten lessons and rules about academia that she had to figure out on her own.

Her commitment to inclusivity, she says, stems from her experiences growing up in a place that is a mix of immigrants from Southeast Asia, indigenous Chamorro people, and U.S military families.

Guam is such a medley of so many different cultures, and having that worldly view, I try to be aware of how diverse peoples backgrounds are coming into lab and coming into scientific research. In practice, this means not making assumptions about what people know or the experiences theyve hadand adapting her mentoring style as needed. My culture has provided me with the tools to speak in many languages, figuratively speaking, she says.

She has learned a great deal from meeting scientists from around the worldsuch as the postdoctoral researcher in her lab from Hong Kong and Canada who attended school in the United Kingdom and Austriaand hearing how their experiences compare to her own.

As Cho has advanced in her career, she has come to embrace her Pacific Islander heritage, along with her unique upbringing. Race and culture are just starting to become part of the conversation in higher education, she says, and she now understands the importance of advocating for and amplifying Asian American and Pacific Islander stories and voices.

Ultimately, Cho strives to imbue students with the confidence to pursue careers in research, regardless of where they come from: One thing I try to teach students is that no matter your background and experience, what you find motivates you and interests you will take you far."

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From a Small Island to a Cutting-edge Lab - Tufts Now