This month’s featured researcher is Dr. Rebecca Spencer. Bekki is a Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, where she runs the Somneurolab, dedicated to studying the neuroscience of sleep. She recently authored a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled, “Contributions of memory and brain development to the bioregulation of naps and nap transitions in early childhood” in which she and her co-author, Tracy Riggins propose that nap transitions are more related to hippocampal development than age specifically. The story has received a lot of attention in the press, including the Boston Globe. You can read about it from the College of Natural Sciences.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in October. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

This month’s featured researcher is Sara A.M. Holec. Dr. Holec is a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Amanda Woerman’s lab in the Department of Biology and Institute of Applied Life Sciences. Sara earned her PhD in 2019 at Creighton University and joined Dr. Woerman’s lab in 2020. She is interested in studying ?-synuclein prion strains and understanding how these differences contribute to human disease. Dr. Holec is the first author on a paper that appeared in Acta Neuropathologica this month that was a collaboration with Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner, titled “Multiple system atrophy prions transmit neurological disease to mice expressing wild-type human ?-synuclein.” They show that six different MSA patient samples transmit neurological disease and induce ?-synuclein prion formation in mice expressing wild-type human ?-synuclein. This paper helps validate the use of mice for the study of human prion diseases.

1: Holec SAM, Lee J, Oehler A, Ooi FK, Mordes DA, Olson SH, Prusiner SB, Woerman AL. Multiple system atrophy prions transmit neurological disease to mice expressing wild-type human ?-synuclein. Acta Neuropathol. 2022 Oct;144(4):677-690. doi: 10.1007/s00401-022-02476-7. Epub 2022 Aug 26. PMID: 36018376.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in September. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

This month’s featured researcher is Katherine Dixon-Gordon. Dr. Dixon-Gordon is an associate professor in the Clincal Program in the Department Psychological & Brain Sciences. She directs the Clinical Affective Science lab, whose mission is to harness innovative research methods to advance our understanding of emotional suffering and intentional self-injury and improve evidence-based, compassionate, and accessible treatments. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Simon Fraser University and she completed her residency and did clinical work at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Dr. Dixon-Gordon is a board certified Dielectic Behavioral Therapy Trainer at Behavioral Tech LLC. She directs the DBT Program in the Psychological Services Center at UMass. She co-authored a paper in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, titled, “The Effectiveness of 6 versus 12 Months of Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Noninferiority Randomized Clinical Trial“, which recently appeared in PubMed.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online this summer. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

This month’s featured researcher in Michael Barresi, who is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Smith College. His lab studies neural and glial development in zebrafish. Michael received his PhD as Wesleyan University and did postdoctoral research in Rolf Karlstrom’s lab at UMass, before joining the faculty at Smith College. He has a recent publication in the journal, Developmental Neurobiology that provides a comprehensive account of the cells that correlate with the timing and position of commissural axon pathfinding in the early forebrain that may be necessary for proper commissure development.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in May. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

This month’s featured researcher is Gottfried Schlaug, who wears many hats. He is an adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Scientific Director of the Human Magnetic Resonance Imaging (hMRI) Center in the Institute of Applied Life Sciences (IALS), and a physician at Baystate Health. He is also a featured speaker at the UMass Interdisciplinary Neurosciences Conference on May 26th. His lab is investigating new ways to use hMRI not only as a diagnostic tool, but for therapy too. This month he has two papers that appeared in PubMed. One is a consensus statement in Nature Protocols: “A checklist for assessing the methodological quality of concurrent tES-fMRI studies“. the other is a collaboration with Finnish and Danish researchers, “Neuroanatomical correlates of speech and singing production in chronic post-stroke aphasia” that was published in Brain Communications.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in April. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

This month’s featured researcher is Nilanjana “Buju” Dasgupta. Buju is a professor in Psychological & Brain Sciences and the Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences. Her research focuses on implicit bias. Her recent publication in Cognitive Research: Principles & Implicatations, which was in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Sanders, is titled, “Anger, race, and the neurocognition of threat: attention, inhibition, and error processing during a weapon identification task.” This study has important implications for social justice. It uses measurements of neural activity to examine whether anger impacts threat assessment.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in November. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.