gray matters - stanford university · 2010-01-14 · “one of the reasons i became inter-ested in...

Gray MattersWinter Quarter 2010Issue 2

Contents1: Tackling aging in the Brunet Lab with stem cell biology, genet-ics, and behavior

3: Neuroscience Program Alumni: find out what graduates are work-ing on now

4: Sung-Yon Kim writes about the state of neuroscience research in Korea

4: Message from Dr. Gary Stein-berg, director of SINTN

6: The life and career of Professor Katrin Andreasson

8: The Expert’s Answer: intriguing neuroscience questions

9: Ten reasons to get involved in public outreach

12: Photos from program events

24: The first-year class: photograph and introductions

29: Editor’s Note and call for con-tributions

“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” The Brunet Lab is integrating stem cell biology, genetics, and behavior to understand the complex molecular mech-anisms underlying aging and longevity.

T he French entertainer Maurice Chevalier could be right, but if old age is fraught with physical and mental deficits, not everyone would agree. After all, isn’t it about quality, not quantity? Of particular concern is the loss of mental facilities that enable humans to sense, enjoy, and participate

in the external world. The onset of a wide array of neurological diseases is positively correlated with age. Even in the absence of de-fined neurodegenerative conditions, learning and memory become compromised in the older population.

By 2030, one out of every five people in the United States will be 65 or older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that by 2050, an American will develop Alzheimer’s Dis-ease every 33 seconds. This makes the study of the aging process increasingly relevant for human health, productivity, and life satisfaction. A key question for everyone is then: how can the negative consequences of aging, particularly on cognitive functions, be diminished?

Over the past five and half years, Anne Brunet, assistant professor in the Department of Genet-

Wed: program-specific diversity events & potluck in the eveningThu: faculty talks in morning/Program-wide Journal Club at lunch/interviews in after-noon/Biosciences-wide reception in eveningFri: interviews all day/housing tour at lunch/wine & cheese reception in evening (followed by dinners in the surrounding area)Sat: diversity brunch/program brunch at Fernald residence/outings for the rest of day & eveningSun: return trips

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The Stanford University Neuroscience Program Letter

© 2009-2010 Stanford University

Published by the Stanford Neuroscience Program.

Please send material for publication consider-ation to [email protected].

Neuroscience Program Interview and Recruitment Weekend, Wed Mar 3 to Sun Mar 7

LAB ProfiLe

Anne Brunet

/ by Victoria Rafalski

After the Farm Catch up with Program alumni

Nicole Calakos, M.D., Ph.D., ’96 with Richard Scheller is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Translational Neuroscience (Depts. of Medi-cine/Neurology and Neurobi-

ology) at Duke University. After graduation, she completed a residency in Neurology at UCSF before returning to The Farm to postdoc with Robert Malenka who had just moved from UCSF to Stanford. Happy to return to her old stomping grounds, she de-veloped expertise in synaptic plasticity and electrophysiology, enjoyed the local biking, and started her family (Tyler Mead ’04). In 2005, she took a faculty position at Duke. Her professional life is split 90/10 between laboratory research and clinical practice in Movement Disorders, a balance that she finds both sustainable and rewarding.

Her laboratory studies the role of synaptic plasticity in disease, focusing upon mechanisms of plasticity at the corticostriatal synapse and their relationship to basal ganglia disorders. She is a Klingenstein Scholar and NARSAD Young Investigator. She lives with her hus-band and two children in Chapel Hill, NC.

Sam Wang, Ph.D., ‘94 with Stuart Thompson, is an associ-ate professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. After leaving Stanford he worked with George Augustine at

Duke University and then at Bell Laborato-ries with David Tank and Winfried Denk be-fore taking his faculty position at Princeton. He also spent a year on fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to work on science and education policy for the United States Senate. His laboratory investigates sensory process-ing with a particular focus on the cerebellum using multiphoton optical methods. He also works on optimization principles of brain ar-chitecture. He has received young investigator awards from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. His book, “Welcome to

Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life,” co-authored with Sandra Aamodt, was published in 2008 with 18 translations planned worldwide. In addition to his research articles (synapse.princeton.edu) he has written on neuroscience for The New York Times, The Wash-ington Post, and USA Today; and on pre-election Presidential polls at elec-tion.princeton.edu. He and his wife, a physician, live in Princeton, New Jer-sey, with their daughter.

After graduating from the program, Silvia Bunge, Ph.D. ’01 with John Gabrieli, moved to Cambridge, MA to do a postdoc with Anthony

Wagner (who was at MIT at the time, but is now a faculty member in Psy-chology at Stanford). She returned to California to take a faculty position at UC Davis in 2003, and moved to UC Berkeley in 2007 for a joint ap-pointment in Psychology and Neu-roscience. Silvia directs the Cognitive Control and Development Laboratory at the Helen Wills Neuroscience In-stitute. Her team uses multiple techniques (fMRI, neuropsy-chology, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and most recently electrocorticography) to study the brain mechanisms that en-able us to control our thoughts and actions.

The Bunge lab conducts research across the lifespan in healthy individuals as well as in several patient populations. They are building on their ba-sic research findings to devel-op cognitive control training programs for use in remedia-tion and rehabilitation. If you are interested in participating

in a study, or know a child or teenager who might be, go to http://bungelab.berkeley.edu/

Andrew “Drew” Patterson, M.D., Ph.D. (Ph.D. Neuro-sciences ‘02, Kobilka Lab) is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Anesthesia. His laboratory explores the roles of adrenergic receptor subtypes in cardiac physiology as well as the impact of inflammation and sep-sis upon cardiac function. Drew is board certified in both Critical Care Medicine and Anesthesiology. He spends the majority of his clinical time as an attending physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and the Trauma Surgery ICU at Stanford Hospital.

Drew also works with volunteer medi-cal organizations providing health care for the poor in third world countries. He has worked in Rwanda, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Drew has re-ceived several teaching awards, including the H. Barrie Fairley Excellence in Teach-ing Award from the residents in the Depart-ment of Anesthesia and two Excellence in Teaching Awards from the Stanford Uni-versity School of Medicine. Drew serves as an Oral Board Examiner for the Ameri-can Board of Anesthesiology. Drew’s wife (Jenny) is a social worker, and they have two children ages nine and seven. They all enjoy outdoor sports, especially skiing.

“Identify and engage mentors. Ideally, you should have several mentors - some at 2, 5 and 10 years from where you are now professionally.” -Nicole Calakos

Drew Patterson (second from left) with members of his team and military escorts - Gitwe, Rwanda, 2006

Studying aging and longevity

ics, has developed a research laboratory geared toward studying the molecular ba-sis of longevity and age-related diseases.

“One of the reasons I became inter-ested in aging research is that I felt that understanding the basis of aging in the nervous system would be a key step in our knowledge of age-dependent cog-nitive decline and disease,” explains Dr. Brunet, who also has appointments in the Neurosciences and Cancer Biology programs.

A growing part of the Brunet lab is fo-cused on understanding the mechanisms of maintenance of neural stem cells in the aging brain and how this may prevent the decline of cognitive functions during ag-ing.

It was long believed that “no new neurons” were produced in the adult mammalian brain. It is now clear that a population of stem cells called neural stem cells exists in the brain throughout life. These neural stem cells can give rise to all cell types in the brain (neurons, as-trocytes, and oligodendrocytes), serving as an endogenous source for the replace-ment of neural cells.

Harnessing the regenerative potential of adult neural stem cells has been pro-posed as the future for repair of acute brain damage and age-associated cogni-tive decline. However, the pool of neu-ral stem cells diminishes in number and function with age. There is now great in-terest in understanding what factors, ge-netic and environmental, influence neu-ral stem cell function during aging.

A postdoctoral fellow in the Brunet

lab, Valérie Renault, recently discovered that a gene known to extend lifespan, called Foxo3, plays a critical role in the maintenance of neural stem cells in adult mice (Renault et al., 2009). Foxo fac-tors are insulin and stress-responsive tran-scriptional regulators that influence cell cycle and apoptosis, DNA damage repair, and cellular metabolism. They are most well known for extending lifespan in C.elegans and other invertebrates.

“It’s possible that genes that affect aging in invertebrates evolved in more complex organisms to regulate the pool of adult stem cells for the purpose of tis-sue repair,” says Dr. Brunet.

In addition to studying how Foxo3 in-fluences adult neural stem cell function,

the lab is also investigating how epigen-etic regulators, such as the chromatin-modifying enzyme Sirt1, affect the pool of neural stem cells during aging. It is be-coming clear that there are multiple and interlocked layers of molecular control in this system.

The Brunet lab is also undertaking be-havioral studies of young and old mice lacking Foxo family members expressed in the brain. Studying how a ‘longevity gene’ controls behaviors as a function of age will be important to understand the mechanisms underlying the deterioration of cognitive function during aging and the possible contribution of neural stem cell depletion in this process.

Research on neural stem cells in the Brunet lab is funded by a recently award-ed grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), an

award that amounts to 1.5 million dollars over 5 years.

According to Dr. Brunet, “The CIRM grant will allow us to venture into un-charted territories, for example, the dif-ferences in lifespan and stem cells be-tween species. How is it that humans live 80 years and mice just 3 years? Are their stem cell pools fundamentally different?”

A unique strength of the lab is the di-versity of model organisms, which also includes the genetically tractable worm C. elegans and a short-lived African fish species N. furzeri, used to investigate a va-riety of biological phenomena associated with aging. Given that human lifespan is on the order of decades, aging studies (and Ph.D. students) greatly benefit from these model organisms.

Dario Valenzano, a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab, sums up the group’s research: “We take a multi-level approach to the study of the biological bases of ag-ing and longevity. By integrating forward and reverse genetics, stem cell biology, and behavior, we aim to unweave the complex canvas underlying aging.”

Unraveling the complexities of the nervous system is often referred to as the ‘final frontier’ of science. The exploding field of aging research is on an equally challenging quest to answer questions humans have been pondering for centu-ries. Why do we age? How far can we extend maximum lifespan? Can some of the deleterious effects of aging on the nervous system be prevented or even re-verted? Research at the intersection of the neuroscience and aging fields should yield fresh results.

For more information, visithttp://www.stanford.edu/group/brunet

Renault, V.M., Rafalski, V.A., Morgan, A.A., Salih, D.A., Brett, J.O., Webb, A.E., Villeda, S.A., Thekkat, P.U., Guillerey, C., Denko, N.C., Palmer, T.D., Butte, A.J., and Brunet, A. (2009). FoxO3 regulates neural stem cell homeostasis. Cell Stem Cell 5, 527–539.

This profile was written by Victoria Ra-falski, a Neuroscience Program gradu-ate student in the Brunet lab.

Neural stem cells from adult mice infected with green fluorescent protein-expressing lentiviral vectors used to modu-late longevity genes (Photo by Victoria Rafalski)

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Gray Matters The Stanford University Neuroscience Program Letter 2 Gray Matters The Stanford University Neuroscience Program Letter Winter 2010 3

but we have raised about $3 million in gifts over the first year, which will be matched by SINTN. In addition to the CIRM grant we also received about $2 million in grants to SINTN, so it’s been a very successful year.

The Institute cores are very im-portant too, as they provide service to all of our neuroscience initiatives and programs. The behavioral core already existed prior to this year, and develops mostly rodent behavioral models. It’s located in several places now – at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, in the Grant building, and in MSLS. Mehr-dad Shamloo is directing that core - it’s oversubscribed, but we’d like to make it available for everyone.

The microscopy/imaging core, headed by Andrew Olson, is expand-ing very quickly, with some equipment at Fairchild, and the rest at Arastradero. This core will complement the Beck-man CSIF. We have also created a gene vector core to make viruses, that is di-rected by Michael Lochrie.

We’re funding neuroscience weekly seminars, the Neuroscience Program boot camp, and the SINTN Retreat. We want to fund an annual one to two day symposium as well.

There’s great potential for neurosci-ence at Stanford to achieve something unique and transformative. I came here in 1974 as an MSTP student, primarily because of the great neuroscientists.

The Institute started as a grassroots phenomenon. One of my dreams when I arrived at Stanford was to fos-ter highly interdisciplinary research, and I think we’re succeeding in that. How do you pull together 150 neuroscien-tists and neuroclinicians at Stanford who all are brilliant and ambitious, and want to build their own programs? How do you get them to collaborate? That is what this is all about, as well as making a difference in patient care. Gary Steinberg is the Director of the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innova-tion & Translational Neurosciences (SINTN).

Our overall goal for the Institute (SINTN) is to understand the normal brain and spinal cord during health, the abnormal nervous system during disease and injury, the molecular, cellular, and circuit physiology of the brain and spinal cord, and what happens when things are deranged.

As importantly, we want to pioneer new techniques to accelerate the translation of these new technologies into novel strategies to repair the ner-vous system and restore function. We want to ultimately help patients, but also understand the fundamental science, which is critical to advancing the field and interesting in itself.

This is, in a way, a rebooted neuroscience institute. We have been focusing on several defined initiatives since I became director in October 2009, and I have to say that we’ve had a very good year. We have accomplished quite a bit, much more than I anticipated in terms of organizing and combining basic science with translational programs.

For instance, we had limited organizational structure before. Now we have a very detailed bluerint that we are going to focus on – we are setting up centers for general research areas.

Take, for example, the Stanford Partnership for Spinal Cord Injury and Repair. We needed to recruit a couple of key players – for clinical director of this program, we recruited Graham Creasey, who’s head of the Spinal Cord Injury Service at the VA, and a very collaborative person. We’ve just finalized the recruitment of Giles Plant from Australia, who is going to be our re-search director and is a world expert on rodent models of spinal cord injury and different methods to repair the spinal cord after injury. He’s planning on starting in March. This Partnership has brought together Stanford, the Palo Alto VA Health System, and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, our county hospital, which has never been done before. We have to take advantage of resources outside of Stanford.

Another area that we have been emphasizing and investing in is our Brain-Computer Interface program. Krishna Shenoy, an engineer, is leading this along with Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon. We want to bring this

technology into the clinic, and we pro-vided significant funding over the next 3 years. Our goal is to implant an ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) patient with a 100-microelectrode array within 18 months, a very aggressive goal. This will allow patients to control computer cur-sors and communicate – ALS patients have a difficult time communicating through either talking or moving as the disease progresses

Our Parkinson’s disease program has been highly successful as well. We have brought in considerable philanthropic support, and have initiated projects ranging from iPS cells originally taken from skin fibroblasts of PD patients and developed into dopamine neurons, to extending optogenetic stimulation to Parkinson’s in rats.

A different and very exciting new initiative is the Stanford Center for the Study of Compassion and Altruism Re-search and Education (CCARE). While it doesn’t investigate the molecular bi-ology of compassion, we are studying compassion and altruism in a rigorous scientific manner. It includes bringing together neuroscientists, psychologists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuro-economists, and contemplative scholars like Buddhists, from Stanford and other institutions.

We don’t want this to be a religious project or “fuzzy” research - that’s often been a problem with the field. We raised a few million dollars for this and as an example, we’re funding projects that use fMRI to determine which brain areas are involved when you make a decision to give your money to charity or to keep it. Some of this work has already been published in Science.

SIM1 will be done soon and ready for stem cells, tissue engineering, and transplantation. We have a floor in the building dedicated to neuroscience, and I just received good news that we were funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) for $20 million to move our embryonic-derived neural stem cells from labora-tory models of stroke to the clinic.

These are tough economic times,

Message from Gary Steinberg, Stanford Neuroscience Institute Director

How is neuroscience re-search in Korea? Well, it is basically very similar to the U.S., except that most of them are Korean and they do experiments while speaking in Korean! There are many PIs who are so hardworking and passionate about their work that they

sometimes forget their spouses’ names, surrounded by easygoing colleagues who go hiking after lunch every day.

There are lots of scientist-wannabe highschool-ers, but only those who fail to find anything more interesting until they graduate end up filling the grad schools. (There are also some sincere fellows like me.) Oh, and one more thing - guys who des-perately want to avoid spending two years of their life in the army also choose to go to grad school, because it is the only legal way to avoid the military service without having their legs broken (to claim disability) or marrying a female lieutenant.

The biggest difference might be the working hours. It varies between labs, but generally speak-ing, we lament that biologists have a typical week of Monday to Friday, then Friday and Friday again. It’s not difficult to find labs that have meetings on Saturday.

I even saw a lab having meetings on the morn-ing of New Year’s Day (despite the fact that they had gotten a paper accepted in Science one day before…). The rationale for long working hours is that people need to work harder in order to over-come language barriers and lack of connections.

The general lab atmospheres have been more or less hierarchical in the older days, but that is changing with the younger generations. During my 6 years at Seoul National University (of which I spent two years in the army), I could feel that it was becoming more lively and less hierarchical.

Similar to the U.S., a large portion of research

Neuroscience in Korea/ by Sung-Yon Kim

funding in Korea comes from a centralized agency called the National Research Foun-dation. Each institution, lab, or individual scientist struggles to win funding through competition. Competition is everywhere and productivity is being even more em-phasized these days - new professors have to prove themselves to get tenure (unlike in the past when tenure was basically guaranteed).

Compared to the U.S. or European coun-tries, Korean neuroscience has a very short history, spanning only about 20 years, which means that we have only a handful of well-trained neuroscientists so far. Recognizing the importance of neuroscience, however, the Korean government introduced the Brain Research Promotion Act in 1998, trig-gering the influx of many ambitious young students to neuroscience. Many universities and institutions now have graduate programs for neuroscience (as well as two-photon la-sers and 7.0T fMRI machines), so that many students choose to finish their doctorate de-gree in Korea rather than going abroad.

Recently, with the national initiative to promote neuroscience, universities received huge amounts of funding in the name of the World Class University Project. It built new neuroscience centers in many institutions and is scouting for prominent neuroscientists from around the world. You can also apply! Also, under construction is the Korea Brain Research Center, whose aim is to create in-ternationally competitive research institutes. A significant portion of the researchers will be foreigners, possibly including the director. The government is planning to spend USD 1.5 billion in neuroscience for the next ten years, which sounds quite promising. Per-sonally, I can’t wait to see how Korean neu-roscience will develop in the coming years. It will be exciting to see how it will con-tribute to the advancement of neuroscience!

Sung-Yon Kim is a first-year student in the Neuroscience Program.

Editor’s Note: This feature is on the state of neuroscience research in countries other than the US. Sung-Yon was kind enough to write in this issue about neuroscience in Korea. We are always looking for other countries--please contact us!

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Neuroscience in Koreacontinued from previous page


catalyzed Kati’s frustration with the lack of knowledge and dearth of treatments available to help her patients. She eventually got in touch with another neurologist, Paul Worley, who had left medicine to run a full-size basic research lab at Hopkins. After obtaining his advice, she decided to pursue a postdoc with him and has since never looked back.

Paul’s area of expertise covered neuronal immediate early genes, or genes whose expression is rapidly and transiently upregulated in response to an external stimulus. Kati was intrigued by one of these, cyclooxygenase-2 (COX2), which is the primary target of NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti-in-flammatory drugs). People who took NSAIDS had a 6-fold lower risk of getting Alzheimers disease during old age. Coming from a clinical back-ground, this was extremely interesting to Kati, and she became determined to unravel the link between neurodegeneration and COX2. Her work dem-onstrated that constitutive overexpression of COX2 resulted in Alzheimers like phenotypes in healthy mice. A successful postdoc enabled her to secure a faculty position at Johns Hopkins where she ran a small size lab.

During her time at Hopkins, Kati had started a family with her husband, Phil Beachy, who was also a faculty member there. Then suddenly in 2006, Kati, along with her husband, received an offer for a faculty position at Stan-ford. Incidentally, Stanford was the very place where Kati and Phil first met as students. They both happily accepted the offer and moved to Stanford

KatrinAndreasson

Problem solver, excellent mentor, passionate scientist, active collaborator, intense yet chill at the same time – who do these words describe? Well yes, almost any Stanford neuroscience faculty member, but they describe one of them particularly well, Katrin Andreasson. Katrin, or ‘Kati’ as her colleagues call her, is an Associate Professor in the Neurology Department at Stanford. She is relatively new on the Stanford scene, having been recruited here three years ago. Several successful rounds of funding have led to the lab’s expansion and put it in a favorable position to answer some of the most exciting questions in the field of neurode-generative disease.

There is more to Kati than meets the eye. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Wash-ington DC, Kati was an only child of immigrant parents. Her mom was a Russian Latvian refugee from WWII, while her dad was a Fulbright scholar from Sweden. During Kati’s

teenage years, her dad worked as an engineer for the US Department of Defense developing a radar tracking display for submarines (kind of like the one you see in James Bond movies!). “He was a very rational and logical person” says Kati, and the one who inspired her interest in science. She has vivid memories of excitedly going to watch the Apollo rocket launches yearly with her dad. Partly influenced by her dad, Kati was fascinated by the process of figuring out how things were engineered. She enjoyed solving problems by putting bits and pieces of information together until the puzzle

was complete. As one would put it, she was already a scientist in the making.Kati became interested in Biology during her undergrad right here at Stanford, when she

took some really stimulating courses and had the opportunity to work in a research lab. In one of her classes, she remembers learning about tumor suppressor genes and being utterly awed by the concept of genetic regulation. However, like most first generation children, Kati was expected to go to medical school and become a doctor. She had never seriously entertained any other options besides med school, so she enrolled at Columbia University to get her MD. Kati recalls her time at Columbia as “a time of great personal development.” It was the first time she came face to face with sickness and death, and was exposed to patients who were victims of poverty and violence. It took her some time to get used to living in NYC as she had never encountered that kind of environment before.

Although Kati enjoyed some aspects of practicing medicine, she had always been har-boring a desire to delve more deeply into research. Her histology class in med school had piqued her curiosity and gotten her interested in studying cell structure and function. So Kati decided to take time off after her third year in med school, and spent a year investigat-ing mechanisms of secretory vesicles at the NIH. She returned to Columbia the following year, completed her MD, and received a match at Johns Hopkins for her neurology residency.

Hopkins is renowned for the outstanding quality of its academic medicine and Kati’s residency team was no exception. Almost everyone on the team had an MD/PhD or a prestigious fellowship, and was planning on going into medical research. This environment

fAcuLty ProfiLe

Associate Professor of Neurology

Katrin Andreasson

with their family. When asked how she dealt with shifting the lab, Kati could not stop lauding the Neurology department and its chair, Frank Longo, for making her transition as smooth as possible. The lab was temporarily housed on the Arastradero campus, and is now well settled in its permanent location in the MSLS building. It consists of about nine people and is looking to grow a bit more over the coming year. Kati describes Stanford as a very “supportive and collaborative place to do research” and likes that it is a “small community where you can actually get to know most of the people”. She loves “being able to meet and work with so many amazing researchers” and feels that this is the per-fect environment for her.

Kati’s research interests have now progressed to pathways downstream of COX2, which involve prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and its receptors. Her lab investigates mechanisms of inflammatory pathways in neurons as well as glia in various disease set-tings. Even though her med school training steered Kati to pursue disease related research, she was heavily influenced by her postdoctoral adviser to investigate the basic mechanisms of cellular pro-cesses. This has led her to conduct both basic and translational research on Alzheimers disease, ALS, and stroke in the context of neuroinflammation. Her research suggests that modulating the activ-ity of PGE2 receptors regulates the inflammatory response in the brain and can ameliorate or exacer-bate disease pathology. Neurodegenerative diseases have proven to be extremely complex and even less is known about their interaction with the im-mune system. But in typical Kati fashion she con-

fesses that “if I weren’t a scientist, I would probably have become a detective as I love figuring out complicated puzzles.”

With all her success as a PI, it is sometimes easy to forget that Kati has done all this while wearing the dual hats of a wife and mother. Somehow Kati managed to raise two toddlers during her postdoc years, who became teenagers at a

time when both Kati and Phil were heading full-size labs. When requested to reveal her secret, she candidly chuckles “I don’t know!” It is clear to those who know Kati that family is her top priority and this shows: her oldest son is now himself an undergrad at Stanford, while the younger one is a student at Gunn High School. One thing Kati does note however is that “raising two boys did wonders for my organizational skills and provided great training for be-coming a PI!”

Not surprisingly, Kati is very happy being a PI at Stanford. She feels really lucky to be part

of such an intellectually stimulat-

ing environment where she comes across innovative ideas everyday. She thinks this is an extremely excit-ing time to study neuroscience due to the vastly superior repertoire of tools available to answer questions posed decades ago without success. Kati’s most important piece of advice to students is to “follow your nose, wherever it goes.” She believes that graduate school is a truly unique pe-riod in one’s career as it’s a great op-portunity to explore and appreciate diverse research topics. “It’s impera-tive to be true to yourself and pursue a question that fascinates you. Once you dig yourself deep enough into a problem that really interests you, your efforts will mushroom into some-thing valuable” she reassures. Kati also strongly encourages students to be as much a part of the scientific commu-nity as they can. Just as the interview session ends she exclaims, “Do what you enjoy, and forget about the rest!” Good advice, I must say.

This profile was written by Suraj Pradhan, a Neuroscience Program graduate student in the Andreasson lab.

Continued from page 3

fAcuLty ProfiLe

Katrin Andreasson’s laboratory on the second floor of the MSLS building (Photo by Suraj Pradhan)

Postdoctoral scholar Jenny Johansson taking images on the confocal mi-croscope (Photo by Suraj Pradhan)

CD68 staining to label microglia in the CA1 region of the hippocampus 24 hours after an LPS injection to induce inflammation

/ by Suraj Pradhan


We’ve also been recording unit activity of individual neurons in awake, behaving epileptic rats. A substantial population of hip-pocampal neurons increases their firing rate before spontaneous seizures, some granule cells as early as 4 minutes before the sei-zure. Four minutes might not sound like much, but it could be a big deal for patients. For example, it could provide enough warn-ing to allow a patient to pull over and stop their car before a sei-zure struck and consciousness was temporally impaired. There is much work ahead to translate this work and directly help patients, because our recordings are obtained with surgically implanted tetrodes, and analysis is done offline – not in real time.

In summary, this is an exciting time for temporal lobe epilepsy research. We’re learning how specific neuronal circuits respond to injury and make the brain epileptic. The challenge now is to translate those discoveries and help patients.

Have a question? Send it to [email protected].

Q

initially by pharmacologically triggering status epilepticus, which causes excitotoxic damage, especially in the hippocampus. The pattern of damage resembles that of patients. After the animals recover, they go through a latent period, and after a few weeks, they start having spontaneous seizures.

At the circuit level, which is our area of focus, there are a couple major ideas of what might be causing the epilepsy. One is insufficient inhibition - many inhibitory neurons die, especially in the hippocampal dentate gyrus. Abundant evidence demonstrates the loss of inhibitory interneurons in patients and animal models.

We recently completed an EM stereological study to count inhibitory synapses, but to our surprise, there is an excess in epi-leptic tissue. There is an initial loss of cells with injury, including many inhibitory interneurons, but in the weeks following, in-hibitory neurons that survived sprout axon collaterals and make many new synapses. Ultimately, epileptic animals end up with more inhibitory synapses per dentate granule cell than in controls.

Paul Buckmaster, Associate Professor of Comparative Medicine and

of Neurology and Neurological sciences, explains:

My lab is trying to identify underlying mechanisms of temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s satisfying work because it could help patients. Compared to how to brains evolve, which is another interest of mine, it’s a more tractable problem.

In most patients, temporal lobe epilepsy is acquired. It can be caused by a variety of brain injuries. After the initial injury there is a seizure-free latent period, then patients start having sponta-neous seizures, which typically persist for the rest of their life. Common precipitating injuries of temporal lobe epilepsy are head trauma, prolonged febrile seizures, brain infections, toxins, meningitis, and hypoxia.

For example, there are documented cases of temporal lobe epilepsy caused by ingesting mussels contaminated with domoic acid, produced by algae that bloom in the ocean off the coast. Domoic acid is structurally similar to the glutamate receptor ago-nist kainic acid.

Individuals poisoned by domoic acid developed severe, pro-longed seizures (status epilepticus). Some survived, became am-nesic, and about a year later developed temporal lobe epilepsy.

Although domoic acid toxicity is rare, temporal lobe epilepsy caused by other brain injuries is common. And it’s difficult to control with anticonvulsant drugs - about a third of patients continue to have uncontrolled seizures.

What happens during the latent pe-riod before seizures start? What’s trans-forming a brain that wasn’t epileptic into one that seizes spontaneously? There are many changes in the brains of epileptic patients and animal models. Which are important and why? If the critical fac-tors were identified, it might be possible to block their development during the latent period and prevent epilepsy. That’s our goal.

Rats and mice are the species used most often to study temporal lobe epilepsy. The animal’s brain is injured

The Expert’s AnswerWhat is temporal lobe epilepsy and how is your lab tackling this problem?

“If we find that there are circuits that do contribute to epilepsy, we can try to block their sprouting and devel-opment, which could be a potential

therapy.”

Before these new findings, it seemed like the best way to test the hypothesis and potentially develop a therapeutic approach was to replace inhibitory synapses by transplanting interneurons or inducing surviving interneurons to form new synapses.

Now we’ve changed strategies. It’s not that there aren’t enough inhibitory synapses; it’s just that the ones that are there are not functioning properly. In epileptic tissue inhibitory synapses are abundant but dysfunctional. Now the goal is to understand why interneurons lose synaptic efficacy, try to restore their function, and test whether that will prevent seizures.

Another major idea is that temporal lobe epilepsy is caused by the development of aberrant recurrent excitatory connections. For example, normally dentate granule cells, which are excitatory, don’t synapse with each other, but in epileptic tissue they do. We recently found a way to suppress development of abnormal posi-tive-feedback connections after an injury. We’re currently testing whether blocking that circuit abnormality will reduce seizure fre-quency. If so, it might lead to an anti-epileptogenic therapy.

10 Reasons for You To Get Involved in Public Outreach / by Egle Cekanaviciute and Jennifer Shieh

Do you remember what sparked your interest in science? Was it the thrill of seeing an explosion in high school chemistry? Or dissecting an earth-worm in preschool? Or an obsession with how epigenetics was affecting

you as you developed in the womb? Though nearly every child is a natural scientist, born with cu-

riosity and a desire to experiment, not everyone grows up to pur-sue that passion as a day job. We are part of that select group, but the critical thinking skills we learn as scientists-in-training could and should be used by everyone.

That is just one of a plethora of reasons why scientists should interact with the general public, both for our good and theirs. Here are ten more.

1. Improve your communication skills.If you can explain your work to a 7th grader or a businessman,

you can explain your work to a fellow neuroscientist. And that’s important for your career. If you do amazing research but no one else understands it, how much impact will it actually have?

2. Reinvigorate your perception of your own work and its impact on the world.

We can easily get bogged down in the latest experimental fail-ure and forget why we’re doing all this in the first place. Explain-ing the big picture to someone can remind you why the project

you’re working on is so awesome. In addition to potentially in-spiring future funding, speaking to non-experts about your re-search allows for an enjoyable variety of questions that may be unpredictable. This provides a broader perspective of the field, possibly propelling your research in unexpected directions.

3. Spread your enthusiasm for your research and for sci-ence in general.

There really is a good reason why we do what we do. Once you’ve remembered that by explaining it to someone, spread that excitement! If you don‘t tell people what you do and why you do it, you can’t expect them to intuitively appreciate the splendor of the synapse or the thrill of thalamic circuitry. Use your own passion to help lay people get both scientifically literate and pas-sionate about research.

4. Be proactive about changing the way the public sees and understands science.

Rather than complaining about how the media oversimplifies things or how the public just doesn’t understand, make an effort to help them understand. Yes, it can be tough to make a difficult concept clear without oversimplifying, but it’s worth the effort. At the very least, it will allow the public to understand the scientific process and why it’s so complicated and takes so long. It will help us as scientists if people have realistic expectations. Rather than thinking that a few years after they approve stem cell research, we’ll have paraplegics running marathons, they will be able to understand why it’s critical not to hold early stages of research back for too long.Electron micrograph and tracing of synapses onto a dendritic spine (s). In green is an excitatory synapse onto the spine

and in red is an inhibitory synapse.

Jennifer Shieh Egle Cekanaviciute


5. Change the scientist stereotype. There are two issues with the scientist stereotype that cause us

to lose a lot of the public starting in middle school: 1) scientists don’t look like them and 2) they don’t want to look like scientists. When people think of scientists, they tend to think of a crazy-haired white male professor in a lab coat. We need to get out there and show them that scientists come in many different sizes, shapes, colors, and dispositions. We can’t help our image by hiding in labs all day and night, so get out there and show off how cool you are (or revel in your nerdiness but at least show that you get to be yourself). Science is one of the rare professions that people choose because they like it, not just because of money or societal pressure - so present yourself as a rebel (with a cause). It would also do good for scientists to remember that we‘re extremely in-teresting people. After all, NIH believes it, NSF believes it, your graduate admissions committee believed it at some point. Now everyone else needs to be convinced of it as well.

6. Break the cycle of poor science education in the US.One big problem with the scientist stereotype is that kids lose

interest in science and we may not be able to get them back. These kids who don’t get a good grounding in science or develop an appreciation for it then grow into adults who don’t care about science. Adults who don’t care about science aren’t likely elect of-ficials who will direct the funding needed for a science education (or education in general for that matter). Without proper funding, kids won’t be exposed to science directly, continuing the sad cycle of poor science education. We have the tools to break that cycle by telling those kids, adults, and the government why science education is so critical.

7. Fulfill your obligation for receiving public funding.

Tax dollars fund much of our research, so we should present that publicly-funded work to our benefactors. They are the ones that put bread on our table and mice in our cages. We owe them an explanation for not having found that cure for cancer yet, and a reassurance that money spent in lab is not money wasted. Talking about scientific research in general and your work in

particular can influence people to think more about financially supporting science, both indirectly through the government (do we want to fund missions to Afghanistan or Mars?) and through direct donations (adopt an orphan disease!).

8. Scientific illiteracy in the public is dangerous.Public support for the scientific enterprise is not only critical

for us to keep our jobs, it is necessary for a reasonable and healthy society. Misinformation bombards everyone all the time - unfor-tunately, many people accept unreliable anecdotes over rigorous research. There is nothing inherently wrong with the coexistence of highly questionable claims and sound evidence; the problem is when people are unable or unwilling to separate the two. For example, despite the glaring lack of evidence for a link between vaccines and autism, the anti-vaccine campaigning of parents and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy is still leading to children not getting vaccinated. Critical thinking and familiarity with the ex-perimental method allows people to interpret results, be flexible in the face of new discoveries, and reject arguments based solely on the “wisdom” of the crowds.

9. We could use more scientific literacy in government.Science and engineering training is great for tackling knotty

problems - this can be true in government too. Unfortunately, it’s actually a stigma for a politician to be branded intellectual these days. We could have ended up with a vice president who makes fun of Drosophila research, for pete’s sake! We need to take action to ensure that the people creating the policies and laws that gov-ern our actions understand what they’re doing. Elected officials have the power to make both good and bad science policy. Help them make the right decisions.

10. If not you, then who?

There’s a tendency to think that someone else will do this. But if we all put that responsibility on a mysterious “someone else” - there won’t be anyone and we will end up blaming an imaginary foe that’s really just us. Don’t let that happen. Take charge and be part of the solution! If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate...

7+ Ways You Can Do ItIt’s really quite ridiculous how easy it is to get involved in “public outreach.” From teaching a full classroom of kids to setting the record straight in a blog comment, from a lifetime of being a good scientific role model to giving a single inspired lecture, you choose the time and place and commitment. So, please do!

1. Brain DayAs Stanford neurostudents, we’re given a great opportunity to

dazzle 7th graders by showing them real brains. This is about the time when a lot of kids start to lose their interest in science (or at least start thinking it’s not cool to show an interest), so it’s impor-tant to keep them enthusiastic. We do this for the Palo Alto com-munity because they support Stanford and we are a part of that community. But this year, we’re also spreading out to East Palo Alto, so now we can expand our excitement about the brain to a local community with fewer resources. Brain Day is our chance to show off what’s cool about science: it’s flashy, splashy, let’s you experiment, play, check your ideas, make mistakes, ask all the “stu-pid” questions, and in the process discover how something works. And really, what’s cooler than finding out how the brain works?

2. Science BusIf you‘d prefer to face a raging leopard or a raging PI rather

than teach 30 unruly 7th graders at a time, there are multiple other options right here at Stanford. For example, you can teach equally unruly 2nd through 5th graders through Science Bus. An after school program in East Palo Alto that meets twice a week, they also organize Science Olympics on Stanford’s campus every spring and field trips to science museums in the Bay Area. You can come for a single session, teach a class every week, or staff the BBQ during the Olympics - any help is greatly appreciated by the kids and their teachers. This is also a chance to broaden

Jennifer Shieh teaching about the brain on “Take Your Sons & Daughters to Work” day

(or show off) your knowledge about scientific topics beyond the brain.

3. Splash!You can also target older kids (7-12th graders) through Splash!

which allows you to design your own 1-4 hour course that fo-cuses on anything at all, including (but not limited to) natural sci-ences. It’s low commitment, medium preparation, and enormous fun. The participating kids are disciplined and interested - it’s a rare opportunity to make an impact on the next nerd generation!

4. Talk to your friends and family.Maybe doing formal presentations isn’t your thing. Or you just

hate kids. Don’t be afraid to try to explain what you do to your non-sciencey friends and family. They might not understand all of it, but at least you’re showing your enthusiasm for it. And letting them know that they can come to you with questions you might be able to answer (like what it means when there’s a study say-ing that this area or that area of the brain lights up when you do something) rather than the questions you probably can’t (or don’t want to) answer (like what you think about that rash). Show them how what you’re studying is relevant to their lives. Maybe even invite them to participate in a project (a small one in your labora-tory or a large-scale one such as SETI@home)– that‘ll make both sides feel proud and important.

5. Talk to strangers. It’s ok to ignore your mom’s advice about not talking to

strangers now. Strike up conversation with people on the plane - or at least be open if they want to strike up conversation. You never know who you’re sitting next to - this could be a great networking opportunity. If you’re a ham, volunteer to give a talk at a science cafe, science pub, or an open mic night. Or don’t give a talk; write a poem or a song or one-act play that incorporates some scientific theme. Yes, there exist critically acclaimed plays about science and scientists - check out “Copenhagen”.

6. Talk to politicians.If you care about some issue, you were probably told that you

should “write to your congressman” - but maybe only got form letters back. Well, it’s still worth it. And now, the Obama adminis-tration has made a policy of openness and public participation. We are part of that public and right now they’re soliciting opinions about what the government should do regarding public access to published federally-funded research results. This includes much of the research we are doing, so if you have ideas or opinions about what should/shouldn’t be done, make yourself heard. Check out The Office of Science and Technology Policy blog for how to do this: blog.ostp.gov

7. Talk to the world.YouTube, Twitter, blogs, Wikipedia, the radio, podcasts - we

have so many avenues available to us these days for communica-tion. We’ve got the tools. Now go out there and use them!

Egle Cekanaviciute is a Neuroscience Program student in Mar-ion Buckwalter’s lab, and Jennifer Shieh graduated in 2009 with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Sue McConnell’s lab.Suraj Pradhan showing animal brains to local high school students at Splash!

Sridharan Devarajan letting students handle brains for the first time at Splash!


BrAiN DAy 2009

Magali Rowan and Rohit Prakash teaching Brain Day at Jordan Middle School, Palo Alto

Andrew Hsu and Suraj Pradhan manning whole brain stations

Program Event Photos

Happy Hour on the CCSR Lawn

NeuroscieNce HAPPy Hour

Students, postdocs, and professors mingling at Happy Hour


Saturday morning of Interview Weekend - preparing to head out on trips

View of downtown San Francisco from Dolores Park

Picnic lunch in Dolores Park

Ross Colvin and Vicki Rafalski work on a jigsaw puzzle in the Homeroom

Enjoying dinner with prospective students at Tsunami Sushi in Mountain View

(from left) Li Li, Suraj Pradhan, and Poh-Hui Chia at Matt Carter’s house during the 2009 Neuroscience Interview Weekend

iNterview weekeND


Logan DJs the retreat bonfire

2009 Stanford Intensive Neuroscience (SIN). First-years (from left): Christine Lee, Corbett Bennett, Patrick House

NeuroscieNce ProGrAM retreAt

Comedy show at the student retreat

2009 Neuroscience Program Retreat at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. The second-year class (then first-years) introduce themselves.

Flip-Cup at the retreat bonfire


Craig Garner imaging cells with students during SIN

First-years Astra Bryant and Dan O’Shea in SINstANforD iNteNsive NeuroscieNce 2009

Lief Fenno, George Vidal, and John Huguenard work on electrophysiology rigs before the start of Fall

Shaul Hestrin teaching students electrophysiology during SIN


Neuroscience students at lunch in Chicago’s Chinatown. (from left) Li Li, David Bochner, Jack Wang, Suraj Pradhan, Andrew Hsu, Ryan Squire, Dan O’Shea

Downtown Chicago

Neuroscience 2009 main lecture hall - the room was packed for NIH Director Francis CollinsThe poster floor

People flooding out after the lecture

NeuroscieNce 2009 (sfN MeetiNG)


Poster session at the Neuroscience Institute Retreat

Grad student/professor limerick competition

Getting down on the dance floor...

stANforD NeuroscieNce iNstitute (siNtN) retreAt 2009

Retreat at Pajaro Dunes - Karl Deisseroth’s lecture

First-years in the Neuro program introducing them-selves at dinner


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Corbett BennettMajor Physics, Classics, PhilosophyHoMetown Kansas Cityfavorite neuroscience probleM The circuitry and mechanisms underlying “eureka” momentswHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? An astronautfavorite discovery/invention/experiMent Michelson-Morley: when failure matterswHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Cosmology

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George Sebastià Vidal Pérez-TreviñoMajor NeurobiologyHoMetown McAllen, Texasfavorite neuroscience probleM Who are the genetic architects responsible for building the beautiful architecture of the mammalian brain? How do they do it?wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? I think I wanted to try architecture, but that wasn’t go-ing to work. Also, I think I also wanted to become a senator. But that wasn’t going to work, either...favorite discovery/invention/experiMent On November 8, 2008, I discovered a round trip fare from Boston to Barcelona for $134.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Organic chemistry. It’s really really really hard, but the theory behind it is very interesting, and synthesis is fun.

Ron AlfaMajor NeurosciencesHoMetown Los Angelesfavorite neuroscience probleM epilepsy.wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? jet pilot.favorite discovery/invention/experiMent the zipper.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? epistemology.

Christine LeeMajor NeurobiologyHoMetown Seoul, Koreafavorite neuroscience probleM What is schizophrenia and how do we fix it?wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? An astronomer or a psychiatrist.favorite discovery/invention/experiMent This question makes my head ache :)wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Astronomy

Cora AmesMajor MathematicsHoMetown Acton, MAfavorite neuroscience probleM How does the firing of a network of neurons translate into what we perceive as conscious thought?wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? An astronaut.favorite discovery/invention/experiMent Galileo’s various discoveries with the telescope.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Biomedical engineering or astrophysics.

Kelly ZalocuskyMajor Biology, Psychology double majorHoMetown Belleville, Illinoisfavorite neuroscience probleM I think mind-body effects are really fascinating. For example, how the placebo effect work? It’s mind-blowing that just by convincing yourself a particular treatment will be effective (or not effective), you can cause actual physiological changes in your body. wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? A potter. I wanted to own a cute little coffee shop where I could sell my pottery. But--upon being told patronizingly that I could “be anything I wanted to be,” I snark-ily told my bubbly 7th grade English teacher that I wanted to be in the WNBA. favorite discovery/invention/experiMent I am really appreciative for paper, the internet, and chap-stick. I really don’t know how people did without these things. And, IgNobel-worthy research--”The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola” (2007), “Woodpeckers and Head Injury” (2002), etc. give me hope that my research might one day get funded after all. wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? I would study traditional plant-based medi-cine. Or--deep sea life--the kind that lives around ocean vents. That stuff is awesome.

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Jack WangMajor Biology & PsychologyHoMetown Vancouverfavorite neuroscience probleM Can I reconstitute the human brain in a dish?wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? Tree-hugging beach bum. favorite discovery/invention/experiMent So I am really happy for Cajal and Golgi’s work in outlining the structure of the nervous system, and I’m gonna let them finish, but the discovery of fire was the best discovery of the human race of all time. OF ALL TIME!!!wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Civil and environmental engineering. How to design and build sustainable communities? How to cheaply purify water for third world nations? How to achieve energy self-sufficiency? How to become a tree-hugging beach bum?

Jennifer EschMajor Molecular and Cellular BiologyHoMetown Bethesda favorite neuroscience probleM How is information represented in the early stages of a sensory system? wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? marine scientist favorite discovery/invention/experiMent A tough question. The golgi stain was a pretty cool in-vention. In terms of classic experiments, Hubel and Wiesel’s recordings from cat visual neurons are some of my favorites. I also really like Logothetis’s experiments on binocular rivalry in the late 90’s where he showed that, within his experimental protocol, binocular rivalry was competition between percepts and not competition between eyes by presenting different fast flickering stimuli to each eye, switching them between eyes, and seeing whether the physical switching influenced a perceptual switch. It’s pretty awesome to have published a letter to Nature in 1996 involving simply 6 volunteers (including the 3 authors), some gratings, and the subjects’ reported perceptions. wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? East Asian Art History or foreign service

Jonathan LeongMajor Biology and MathematicsHoMetown Lincoln, MAfavorite neuroscience probleM Many of my interests begin with sensory systems.wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? Popular? I really don’t remember. It’s likely that I couldn’t make up my mind. Whatever my aspirations, they were probably less exciting than “scientist.”favorite discovery/invention/experiMent Future ones.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Food science, plants, music, nanomaterials/nanotechnology, history/philosophy of science, evolution, a craft of some kind (probably violin making).

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Sung-Yon KimMajor Chemistry & BiologyHoMetown Seoul, Koreafavorite neuroscience probleM Is synaptic plasticity sufficient for information storage in the brain? To show this, I will have to make “memory” without having animal undergo any learning paradigms, which may require 22nd century techniques...but we’ll see.wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? I always wanted to be a scientist since I was born, but in middle school, I digressed to computer programmer since I liked PC games so much. In class, I used to be hung up on designing next-generation role-playing games, none of which ever become fully coded - they were just too ambitious!favorite discovery/invention/experiMent I really like deep-brain-stimulation experiments in freely moving animals. Applying electrical stimuli and just watching how the behavior of the mice changes itself is a lot fun, since it makes me feel like a demigod. When the electrical stimulation rescued a mutant mice’ poor fear ex-tinction, I was very pleased :)wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? I would choose chemical biology, which is greatly expanding these days. One good thing about chemical biologist is that they are capable of both digging out drug target and making drugs for themselves with organic synthesis, which would give me a good chance of making lots of money as well as contributing to human welfare!

Astra BryantMajor BiologyHoMetown Mountain View, CAfavorite neuroscience probleM The biological mechanism(s) responsible for the generation of con-sciousness.wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? A large and exotic animal veterinarian. Basically a cross between Gerald Durrell and James Herriot. favorite discovery/invention/experiMent Richard Feynman’s classic experiment, Rubber O-ring dis-tortion in Ice-Cold Water.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Astrobiology.

Dan O’SheaMajor Electrical EngineeringHoMetown King of Prussia, PAfavorite neuroscience probleM Understanding (and then implementing in silico) the fundamental algorithm(s) of cortical computation.wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? Taller, first and foremost. But career-wise, probably an entrepreneur that founded some cool tech company.favorite discovery/invention/experiMent Initially, I’d go with the internet, but you’ve got to give proper credit to the transistor and IC advances that made it all possible. Together, these facilitated most of the revolutionary advances of the past half-century.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning. It’s a different approach to the same fundamental questions to which I ultimately hope to find answers within neuro-science.

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Casey GuenthnerMajor NeuroscienceHoMetown Billings, MTfavorite neuroscience probleM I’d like to understand the cause(s) of a major neuropsychiatric illness (schizophrenia or autism, for example).wHat did you want to be in Middle scHool? A novelist. I still fantasize about it sometimes, usually when things aren’t going well in the lab. So I fantasize about it most of the time, actually.favorite discovery/invention/experiMent I’m rather fascinated by studies on neural correlates of consciousness (e.g. Logothetis and colleagues); I’m also fond of Michael Meaney’s work on maternal care and epigenetics.wHat would you be studying if not neuroscience? If you just consider the sciences, then prob-ably immunology. Otherwise, philosophy.

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Gray Matters Adhere Postage

Here

CCSR 4235c, 269 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305

Gray MattersPROGRAm DiRECTOR: John Huguenard

EDiTOR: Andrew Hsu

COnTRiBuTinG WRiTERS: Victoria

Rafalski, Suraj Pradhan, Sung-Yon Kim,

Paul Buckmaster, Gary Steinberg, Egle

Cekanaviciute, Jennifer Shieh

T he Stanford Neuroscience Program is undergoing a transformative period - the

student representatives (Jackie, Jaimie, Nick, and Magali) are spearheading a series of initiatives designed to do several things - encourage and foster interac-tions between students and fac-ulty, strengthen the cohesiveness of our neuroscience community, and keep senior students up to date and in the fold after they’ve completed journal club.

A series of informal town hall meetings have been held, and

A New YearEditor’s Note

many great ideas were pro-posed, including inter-class dinners and meetings, social outings, thesis celebrations, happy hours, and newsletters.

As for the program news-letters, we have decided to split Gray Matters into two separate publications that will have dis-tinct looks and serve distinct purposes.

One will be a quarterly document for the Stanford neuroscience community that lists thesis defenses, new pub-lications, meeting posters and

presentations, and so on.On the other hand, this

publication will be less fre-quent and will be for presen-tation to the outside world and program alumni as well as for the entire Stanford neu-roscience community. Your contributions are needed to keep this newsletter going.

We welcome any topic you would like to write about and any ideas you have for new features. Happy New Year!

Andrew Hsu

26.4 percent loss of School of Medicine endowment in 2009 2

expected percent rise in NIH funding levels next year50 years since the

medical school moved to Stanford

Jan 7:

Jan 14:

Jan 21:

Jan 28:

Feb 4:

Feb 11:

Feb 18:

Feb 25:

Mar 11:

Elke Stein (Yale)

Carol Mason (Columbia)

Bernardo Sabatini (Harvard)

Marie Burns (UC Davis)

John Hildebrand (University of Arizona)

Marc Tessier-Lavigne (Genentech)

Yuh-Nung Jan (UCSF)

Susan Ackerman (Jackson)

Connie Cepko (Harvard)

Neuroscience Institute Seminar Series

Gray Matters is looking for contribu-tors for the following features:• Lab and faculty profiles• News & events• Alumni info• Research spotlights• The Expert’s Answer• The Scoop• Student & faculty awards/grants• Program photos

Please send all submissions and re-quests for newsletter subscriptions to [email protected]

Gray Matters The Stanford University Neuroscience Program Letter 28

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