CUNY Neuro Seminar: Fri, April 29 @ 3pm EST

Environmental contributions to Alzheimer's disease

​​​​​​​Dr.Masashi Kitazawa, Ph.D. (University of California, Irvine)

This is an online seminar. 

Please email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for a link to attend

Monday 4/11 Biology Seminar: Madeline Shea

Calmodulin Interactions with Intracellular Fibroblast Growth Factors and Voltage-Gated Sodium Channels

Madeline Shea, Ph.D. (University of Iowa)

12pm EST

online seminar, email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for link to attend

Friday (4/8) CUNY Neuro seminar: Alex Wade

Functional neuroimaging of human visual pathways underlying the perception of motion in depth.

Alex Wade, Ph.D. (University of York, UK)

In the middle of the 20th century it was noted that the mathematical operations required to compute motion in depth (MID) from binocular inputs can be executed in two different sequences. One sequence computes the rate of change of retinal disparity ('changing disparity', CD). The other sequence computes the disparity of two monocular velocity signals ('inter-ocular velocity difference, IOVD). In this talk, I present recent work from my lab examining the functional specializations of these two pathways as well as their computational time courses and anatomical substrates.

3pm EST - Seminar Online

Email for link: el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu

Dr. Grunfeld!

Congratulations to Itamar on a fabulous job defending his thesis, and becoming a PhD yesterday!

Myelinated neuron cookies courtesy of Emma

Dr. Grunfeld with a safety learning needlepoint courtesy of Carolina


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 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.

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