Emma Denholtz has officially joined the lab and is fully immersed in our work on circuits that encode safety signaling in the brain. In this period of uncertainty (and associated anxiety), we’re very interested in figuring out how the brain extracts information about cues that organisms rely on for safety, as a means to relieve anxiety. Emma is working on using behavior, electrophysiology, neuroanatomy, and calcium signaling to delve into this question. Happy to have you on board!
July 13th - FENS virtual seminar session (13:00 - 14:30 British Summer Time!)
If you are attending FENS, virtually stop in to say hello at our session, where we on focus on how to develop new therapeutic approaches to battle fearful and addictive memories.
S32 - The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: recent advances to reduce fear and addictive memories
Bianca Silva (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne): A thalamo-amygdalar circuit underlying the extinction of remote fear memories
Kerry Ressler (Harvard Medical School): Biomarkers of Trauma Response and Recovery: Intermediate Phenotypes as Targets for Interfering with Trauma Memories?
Ekaterina Likhtik (Hunter College, CUNY): Safety training as a therapeutic tool to improve fear discrimination: translational implications.
Amy Milton (University of Cambridge): Preventing Drug Relapse by Modifying Memories: Challenges and Opportunities in Exploiting Reconsolidation to Treat Addiction.
New pre-print out on BioRxiv
Salient Safety Conditioning Improves Novel Discrimination Learning.
Overgeneralized fear is a prevalent symptom in disorders of anxiety, and we are interested in finding therapeutic approaches to increase discrimination of non-threat in high-anxiety populations. We show that high anxiety mice (that also typically have high overgeneralized fear, like humans), improve in learning outcomes and discriminate non-threatening stimuli better after we train them on salient safety cues. It’s possible that our salient safety paradigm, trains the same networks as will later be active during non-threatening stimuli.
Great teamwork by Itzik and Jenny in the lab!
Does Wikipedia do a good job covering the work that women do in STEM?
In their blog piece, Rebecca Zhang from the lab and Mackenzie Lemieux from Kay Tye’s lab (Salk Institute) highlight how building Wikipedia pages for women in STEM is a game changer for disseminating the scientific accomplishments of women working in science. The recognition has a myriad benefits, including helping prospective graduate students, like Rebecca, find out about potential mentors and pinpoint suitable graduate programs that might never be discovered otherwise.
Congratulations to Jenny on winning the Jonas E. Salk Scholarship!
Jenny will be heading off to University of Rochester Medical School with a Jonas E. Salk Scholarship for her excellent work in the lab on how safety learning positively impacts other behaviors, and the brain. This work has clinical applications and we look forward to checking in on her progress as she learns about other ways to keep everyone healthy.
Talk at the Advanced Science Research Center
Looking forward to sharing our work at the ASRC Lunch & Learn online seminar series on Thursday, June 4th from 12:00 - 1:30.
I will be discussing “Novel pathways of fear suppression learning”.
email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu if you are interesting in attending.
Congratulations to Rebecca on winning the Fulbright Scholarship!
In the fall, Rebecca will be heading off to Germany to work with Nadine Gogolla at the Max Plank Institute of Neurobiology to study the insular cortex. In the lab Rebecca has been working on the pathways linking the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and the basal forebrain in emotion regulation, which is a perfect segue for this next stage in her research career. Awesome job!
Lab keychains that Rebecca designed and 3D printed for the lab.
Congratulations to our senior undergrads!
Great talks by Jenny, Rebecca, and Destinee at the Hunter Undergraduate Student Research Conference this week!
Special thanks to Michael Steiper for organizing the college-wide conference.
Fri, April 17: Problems in neural and cognitive computation
Virtual Symposium held by The Graduate Center Initiative for Theoretical Sciences.
Join here: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/3025052077
email el1417@hunter.cuny.edu for pw to attend.
Response to COVID19
Our lab PPE went out to medical staff in NYC, and we are 3D printing face shields that are going out to hospitals in NY, NJ, and PA. Special thanks to Rebecca for optimizing the design for our printer, to allow for scaling up our face shield production! We are printing a modified version of the original design by Carbon, which works with our Form2 Formlabs printer (Draft or Tough resin).
There are a variety of online communities focused on 3D printing PPE, including NYC Makes PPE, and FormLabs.
Corona Virus Genome Tracker
Our Biology Dept. colleague, Weigang Qiu, and his research group, are working on an interactive Genome tracker for COVID-19. It’s a work in progress that visualizes how the viral genome geographically evolves, and how it compares to other viruses.
Congratulations to Carolina and Becky!
Congratulations to Carolina on winning the Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship for the Sciences and to Becky on winning the NIH Outstanding Scholars in Neuroscience Award Program - OSNAP!
Fantastic to see students get recognition for their hard work!
Friday 3/6 Neuroscience Seminar: Mihaela Iordanova
Behavioral and neural mechanisms of secondary fear cues.
Mihaela Iordanova (Concordia University)
Friday, March 6, 10-11:30am
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue @34th Street, Room 6496
Monday 3/2 Biology Seminar
Development and evolution of the neural crest in vertebrates.
Maria Elena de Bellar (Califonia State University, Northridge)
Monday, March 2nd, 12-1pm
Rm. 926, Hunter North
Monday 2/24 Biology Seminar: Peter Lipke
Using the Force for Good and Evil: Force-induced Amyloids make Biofilms and Beer, and Redirect Innate Immunity.
Peter Lipke (Brooklyn College)
Monday, February 24, 12:00-1:00pm
Rm. 926 Hunter North
Friday 2/21 CNC Seminar: Peter Balsam
‘To go or not to go - Is that the question? The many faces of dopamine in learning and motivation.”
Peter Balsam (Barnard College - Columbia University)
Friday, February 21st, 10-11:30
The Graduate Center, Room 6496
Fifth Ave. and 34th Street
Friday 2/14 CNC Seminar: Dustin Rubenstein
“Coping with Environmental Change: Integrating Behavior and Mechanism”
Dustin Rubenstein (Columbia University)
Friday 2/14, 10am, Room 6496
The Graduate Center @ Fifth Ave & 34th Street
Friday, 2/7, Neuroscience seminar by Vincent McGinty
“Value is in the eye of the beholder: visual attention and value signals in the primate orbitofrontal cortex.”
Vincent McGinty (Rutgers University - Newark)
Friday 2/7, 10-11:30am
The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave (@ 34th St), Room C202
Friday, 12/6, Presenting our work @ SUNY Albany
I’m looking forward to sharing our work on circuit communication during fear suppression at SUNY Albany, where I will tie together our older and newer work on this topic. We look at circuit communication in fear suppression during discrimination of a non-threatening cue, extinction of a threatening cue, and safety learning in order to have a thorough understanding of neural processing in emotion regulation.
Friday 12/6 @ 10am, Michael Beauchamp at the Neuroscience Seminar
Michael Beauchamp (Baylor College of Medicine)
Neural mechanisms for multisensory integration and visual perception in human subjects
10-11:30am, Rm. C198, The Graduate Center