Congratulations to Itamar on a fabulous job defending his thesis, and becoming a PhD yesterday!
Friday 3/11 @3pm EST: CNC Seminar - Kevin Beier
"Viral-genetic dissection of the midbrain dopamine system"
Kevin Beier, PhD (UC Irvine)
The midbrain dopamine system is critical for a variety of adaptive and pathological behaviors. Different subpopulations of midbrain dopamine cells are integrated into different circuits and mediate different behavioral functions. How these subcircuits are selectively modified by experience to elicit adaptive and maladaptive behavioral adaptations in response to experiences is not known. I will discuss some of my lab's recent work eliciting pathway-specific changes that contribute to drug-evoked behavioral changes that contribute to addiction.
Please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to seminar
To Ukranian scientists & trainees seeking to continue doing research
We are deeply affected by the ongoing savagery in Ukraine that is perpetrated by the Russian government. Having left Russia in 1987, and coming from a Russian & Ukranian background, it’s very hard to watch this unfold.
If you are a scientist who is seeking to continue in research but can not currently do so in Ukraine, we can welcome you for a Research Fellow position in our lab in New York. Please take a look at the Research Interests section of this site, and email me at el1417 dot hunter dot cuny dot edu.
Bio Seminar: Mon. 3/7 - Peter McNaughton
“HCN2 ion channels drive neuropathic pain, migraine, and tinnitus”
Peter McNaughton, Ph.D. (King’s College London)
Monday, 3/7/22 @ 12pm EST
Please email el147 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link
We would all like to avoid pain – but acute pain (the pain felt shortly after injury) is essential for life, because it is a critical warning system that protects us from damage. Chronic pain, by contrast, is a long lasting pain that often serves no useful purpose.
HCN (Hyperpolarization-activated, Cyclic Nucleotide gated) ion channels are activated both by membrane hyperpolarization and by inflammatory mediators that activate G-protein coupled receptors and thus elevate the intracellular level of cAMP. When activated, HCN channels generate an inward current that can depolarize a nerve cell to threshold and initiate action potential generation. In painsensing neurons (nociceptors, receptors for noxious stimuli) these action potentials transmit a sensation of pain to the spinal cord and then on up to conscious levels. We found that genetically deleting the HCN2 isoform in nociceptors abolished the neuropathic pain caused by nerve injury. Similar results were obtained with a drug that blocks HCN ion channels. Importantly, there was no effect on acute pain thresholds. These results show that HCN2 is a key driver of chronic pain.
In more recent work we have extended the idea that HCN2 may drive abnormal excitability of sensory neurons to other pathologies – painful diabetic neuropathy, arthritis, migraine and tinnitus, with promising results in all these apparently distinct conditions.
We conclude that HCN2 is a critical target for the development of novel analgesics. A challenge has been to develop selective blockers that will inhibit HCN2 ion channels without interfering with the closely - related HCN4 ion channels that are important in driving the heartbeat.
Neuro Seminar: Friday, March 4 @ 3pm EST
Balance between protective and harmful subsets of microglia in an aging brain. Dr. Pinar Ayata (Advanced Science Research Center, CUNY).
Microglia, the resident macrophages of the brain, perform homeostatic functions that support the health and function of neurons and are implicated in neurological disorders. The first part of the talk will focus on the brain region-specific diversity of microglia and an epigenetic mechanism underpinning their diversity, which is necessary for normal brain function. Second part of the talk will focus on the transcriptional and signaling mechanisms governing the diversity of microglia in Alzheimer's Disease, where some subsets prevent disease progression while others aggravate it. Together these results attribute a critical role for the population balance of microglia in neurodegeneration
Please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to join
Neuro Seminar: Friday 2/25, Barbara Knowlton
Value-directed remembering. Barbara Knowlton, Ph.D. (UCLA)
Friday, February 25, 3:00pm
please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link.
The ability to prioritize valuable information is critical for the efficient use of memory in daily life. When information is important, we engage more effective encoding mechanisms that can better support later retrieval. I will describe a dual-mechanism framework of value-directed remembering in which both strategic and automatic processes lead to the differential encoding of valuable information and depend on different brain mechanisms. Strategic processes rely on awareness of effective deep encoding strategies that allow younger and healthy older adults to selectively remember important information. This ability relies on specifically engaging left hemisphere regions involved in semantic processing when encoding valuable information. In contrast, some high-value information may also be encoded automatically in the absence of intention to remember and this ability may be impaired in older age. This automatic enhancement of encoding of high-value items may be supported by activation of midbrain dopaminergic projections to the hippocampal region.
Fri Feb. 18: Marc Diamond
CUNY Neuro Seminar, 3-4:30pm EST
Cell and molecular insights into propagation of tau pathology, Marc Diamond, M.D. (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center)
Please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for a link
Fri 2/4 @ 3pm EST CUNY Neuro Seminar - Michael Goldberg
To join: email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for a Zoom link to the seminar.
Corollary Discharge and Proprioception: two brain mechanisms for spatially accurate movement.
Michael E. Goldberg M.D. (Columbia University)
A longstanding problem in cognitive psychology is to understand how the brain can turn the spatially unreliable retinal signal into a spatially accurate visual signal for action and perception. Two great 19th century neuroscientists proposed very different solutions to the problem. Herman von Helmholtz postulated that the motor system could feed information about upcoming eye and head movements to the visual system to compensate for those movements. Sir Charles Sherington postulated that the brain could use proprioception to measure where the eyes are in the orbit and where the head is on the shoulders and calculate where an object is in space from those data. I will present evidence demonstrating that the brain uses both of these strategies to achieve a spatially accurate representation of the visual world.
Research Highlight - Shona Chattarji & Ashutosh Shukla
In this Research Highlight, we put the spotlight on a terrific new study from Shona Chattarji and Ashutosh Shukla, where they show that chronic stress has the unexpected effect of eliminating avoidance responses.
Here is their study in Neuropsychopharmacology!
Friday, Jan 28, 11-3pm EST: Dimensionality and dynamics in networks of neurons
Registration link for this event on Zoom: http://bit.ly/3ndixKI
We went glazing!
We took our brushes to the ceramics studio and went glazing. Some beautiful work came out of the firing!
Friday (12/10) Neuro Seminar: Itamar Grunfeld & Liat Kofler
Graduate students take over the CUNY Neuro seminar, with our own Itamar speaking.
3:00pm EST - Liat Koefler (Gao Lab, Brooklyn College): “Autonomic nervous system activity and social influences on psychopathic traits in children”
3:30pm EST - Itamar Grunfeld (Likhtik Lab, Hunter College): “Chronic social defeat stress leads to overgeneralized fear and impaired safety learning through disrupted communication between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.”
email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to seminar
Wed 12/8 ASRC Structural Biology Seminar
Evolutionary and mechanistic diversity of CRISPR RNA-guided transposases
Dr. Samuel Sternberg, Ph.D. (Columbia University)
12-1pm EST
Email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to seminar
Friday (12/3) CUNY Neuro Seminar: Luke Remage-Healey
Estrogen Synthesis and Action in the Brain
Dr. Luke Remage-Healey, Ph.D. (U Mass Amherst)
3-4:30pm EST
email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to seminar
Friday (11/19) CUNY Neuro seminar: Dr. Mauricio Delgado
Reward Processing in the Human Brain.
Dr. Mauricio Delgado, Ph.D. (Rutgers University)
Friday (11/19), 3:00pm EST
please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to attend
Friday (11/12) CUNY Neuro Seminar: Dr. Erin Gibson
Dr. Erin Gibson, Ph.D. (Stanford University)
Timing Myelin: A new perspective on circadian mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction
Friday, 11/12 @ 3pm EST
Please contact el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to seminar
Friday (11/5) CUNY Neuro Seminar: Dr. Sarah London
Friday (11/5), 3:00-4:30 pm EST
Neurogenomics of Developmental Learning
Dr. Sarah London, PhD. (University of Chicago)
Send an email to el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for a link to attend.
Mon 10/25 Biology Seminar @ 12pm EST - Paul Feinstein
Monday, October 25, 12-1pm EST
Of Smell and COVID
Dr. Paul Feinstein, Ph.D. (Hunter College, CUNY)
For link to seminar, please email: el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu
Mon 9/20 Biology Seminar @ 12pm - Andreas Kottmann
Monday, September 20
Dopaminergic Co-Transmission with Sonic Hedgehog in the Adult Basal Ganglia Suppresses Involuntary Movements
Dr. Andreas Kottmann, Ph.D. (CUNY School of Medicine, CUNY)
To join, please contact el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu
Fri. 9/17, Tingting Wu at the CUNY Neuro Seminar
Friday, 9/17 @ 3pm
Anterior insular cortex is a bottleneck of cognitive control
Dr. Tingting Wu (Queens College, ASRC, CUNY)
To attend, contact: el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu