UMass Neurosciences Publications – February 2024

This month’s featured researcher is Dr. Courtney Babbitt. Courtney is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department. Her lab studies gene regulation with a particular focus on primate brain evolution. She has two publications already this year, one in the journal eLife, titled, “Tempo and mode of gene expression evolution in the brain across primates“, shows variations in gene expression in humans and chimps that correlate with brain size. The other paper, published in Genome Biology and Evolution, shows that human and chimp astrocytes have contributed greatly to glucose metabolism in humans.

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

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UMass Neurosciences Publications – Winter 2023/24

This month’s featured researcher is Dr. Elena Vazey. Elena is an associate professor in the Department of Biology. Her lab studies the role of the locus coeruleus and norephinephrine on targets in the cerebral cortex. They are specifically interested in how changes in firing patterns of locus coeruleus neurons alter function of different cortical regions, and how this may impact cortical processing of incoming sensory information and responses to sensory cues. A recent paper from her lab, published in eLife. found sex differences in the modulation of premotor cortex to noradrenergic inputs that plays a role in decision-making by suppressing irrelevant information to enable efficient action planning and decision-making.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in December 2023 and January 2024. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

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UMass Neurosciences Publications – November 2023

This month’s featured researcher is Dr. Alissa A. Nolden, who is an Assistant Professor and holds the Clydesdale Professorship in the Department of Food Science. Her lab studies chemosensory perception in humans. In particular they examine how individual differences in responses to foods and chemicals is associated with genetic variability, and how chemosensory perception changes as a result of dietary exposure, disease or therapeutic compounds. She was recently an author on a paper in the Journal of Voice titled, “Examining the Influence of Chemosensation on Laryngeal Health and Disorders“. She has examined taste loss in cancer patients. She was recently quoted in Science Magazine regarding a study that examined why the COVID-19 remedy paxlovid makes things taste bitter.

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.

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IONs fall poster conference was a great success.

Fall Poster session

On November 8, 2023, the Initiative on Neurosciences hosted the fall poster session in the Student Union Ballroom, drawing over 130 people. All 5 local colleges, along with Wellesley College, UMass Chan Medical School, and Yale University were represented. You can read the abstracts here. The conference was headlined by a research talk from the new dean of the College of Natural Sciences, Michael Fox, “Shedding light on mechanisms that wire the brain”. We are grateful for dean Fox and the many students, staff, and faculty that showed up to make this event such a success!

UMass Neurosciences Publications – October 2023

Meghan Huber

This month’s featured research is Dr. Meghan Huber. Meghan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in the College of Engineering. She also has adjunct appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences. Meghan runs the Human Robot Systems Laboratory, which focuses on understanding how humans and robots can learn from the physical interactions of one another. She has a recent paper in the Journal of Neurophysiology, which examines energy expenditures during human walking by simulating responses on a split treadmill. She applies some of this knowledge to wearable exoskeletons as described in a recent BioRxiv preprint.

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.

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Postdoc Spotlight: Des Ramirez

This month’s Postdoc Spotlight is honoring Dr. M. Desmond Ramirez. Des has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Katz Lab, but will be heading to the Pacific Northwest to join Cris Neill’s lab studying the octopus visual system. Des has a passion for vision; he completed his PhD at the University of California Santa Barbara studying octopus “skin sight” and he earned his MS at Michigan State where he studied the role of vision in the honeybee dance language. During his time in the Katz Lab, Des created a single cell transcriptomic atlas of neurons in the nudibranch Berghia stephanieae. His work is available in BioRxiv and awaiting review elsewhere.

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UMass Neurosciences Publications – Summer 2023

ChangHui Pak

This summer’s featured Researcher in Dr. ChangHui Pak, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She has joined UMass in 2018 after completing postdoctoral research in the lab of Nobel laureate, Thomas Sudhof. The Pak Lab studies the molecular signaling pathways involved in synapse formation. One of the techniques that they use is the creation of brain organoids from induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs). She was recently senior author on a Book Chapter titled, “Method to Generate Dorsal Forebrain Brain Organoids from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells” published in Stem Cell-Based Neural Model Systems for Brain Disorders.

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

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UMass Neurosciences Publications – April 2023

Alexander Surovov

This month’s featured researcher is Alexander Suvorov, who is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and the Graduate Program Director of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Alexander is also an associate member of the Neuroscience & Behavior Graduate program. His lab studies environmental endocrine disruptors that have the ability to interfere with endogenous hormonal signaling. Exposure to these substances during critical periods of prenatal or neonatal life may cause permanent reprogramming of target tissues, likely epigenetic in nature, which often do not present immediate phenotypes but can ultimately lead to adulthood onset diseases. He is a co-author on a review article that appeared recently in Human Reproduction Update titled, “Age-associated epigenetic changes in mammalian sperm: implications for offspring health and development“. This work dovetails with a recent NSB seminar by Bianca Marlin on transgenerational transmission of information. It also resonates with the theme of the Neuroscience of Aging for the May 3st Interdisciplinary Neurosciences Conference

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.

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Student Spotlight – Hui Wei

Hui Wei is a third-year Computer Science PhD student in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, where he works under supervision of Prof. Benjamin Marlin in the Robust and Efficient Machine Learning (REML) lab. His research interest is applying machine learning to improving human health. Currently, he is working on machine learning for mobile health and the missing value problem in the time series data. Previously, Hui was working on evaluating the clinical diagnostic accuracy of dementia subtypes, with Prof. Narges Razavian in the Department of Population Health, NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

His recent publication in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience compares the diagnosis in the clinic with autopsy results on Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body disease and their combination with respect to different Clinical Dementia Rating stages. They demonstrate the diagnosis of these dementia subtypes is inaccurate and also suffers from the significant disparity in race and sex.