Volen National Center for Complex Systems

As the astrophysicist and science commenter Neil Degrasse Tyson remarked, “Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.” How can these mysteries be solved? What are the best approaches for this undertaking? While understanding the properties and activity of single neurons is vitally important, it is understanding how these neurons work together that will truly provide an understanding of the brain.

Neurons form networks — connections between multiple neurons and between multiple areas of the brain— in order to generate complex behaviors. For example, as the work of one speaker explores, detection of taste can lead to particular motor behaviors, through a network of neurons between two areas of the brain. Alterations in these networks, due to neurological damage or disorders, can disrupt these behaviors.

The 2014-2015 M.R. Bauer Colloquium Series focused on methods of exploring neural networks among multiple sensory areas. Ten distinguished scientists discussed insights and methods of exploring the functions of neural networks, using organisms ranging from the simpler nervous systems of the worm C. elegans and the fruit fly, to transgenic mice, to humans and artificial neural networks. Each speaker has presented a summary of his or her work, which is preceded by a brief introduction, set in italics, explaining the research in the more general framework of the effect on neural networks and behavior.

Anatol Kreitzer, PhD
Department of Physiology and Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease
University of California, San Francisco

Kathleen Cullen, PhD
Department of Physiology
McGill University

Kristin Scott, PhD
Division of Neurobiology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute
University of California, Berkeley

Kang Shen, PhD
Department of Biology
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Stanford University

David D. Ginty, PhD
Department of Neurobiology
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Harvard Medical School

Diane Lipscombe, PhD
Department of Neuroscience and Brown Institute for Brain Science (BIBS)
Brown University

BJ Casey, PhD
Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology
Weill Medical College of Cornell University

Every year, the M.R. Bauer Distinguished Guest Lecturer program brings to campus two well-known and visible scientists who spend a full week at Brandeis. These visitors present talks to small and large groups, visit center laboratories, and engage students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in informational and highly interactive conversations about shared areas of research interests. This year our distinguished lecturers were René Hen from Columbia University and Eric Herzog from Washington University in St. Louis.

René Hen, PhD
New York State Psychiatric Institute
The Kavli Institute for Brain Science
Columbia University

Erik Herzog, PhD
Department of Biology
Washington University in St. Louis

The Volen National Center for Complex Systems held its annual scientific retreat from October 17-18, 2014. The work of the keynote speaker, Richard Granger of Dartmouth College, set the theme for the retreat: “Complex models and complex behaviors.” Faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students alike traveled off campus to the Provincetown Inn in Provincetown, Mass. Being away from campus allows the scientists to interact apart from their familiar surroundings and fosters connections and communication that lead to interdisciplinary and innovative collaborations — collaborations that are far less likely to be initiated during the normal bustle of day-to-day life in the laboratory.

In addition to the keynote speaker, we had four Brandeis-affiliated presentations. Two neuroscience postdoctoral fellows, Julijana Gjorgieva and Marc Nahmani, presented in the early morning, followed by presentations by the two most recently hired neuroscience faculty members, Jennifer Gutsell and Shantanu Jahdav. As the summaries that follow will make clear, the 2014 retreat offered a view of the amazing research being pursued at Brandeis. Each project brings a better  understanding of the complex systems around us.

October 17, 2014
2:00 p.m. 
Arrival

4:00 p.m.
Keynote Speaker
Richard Granger, Dartmouth University
From Percept to Concept: Proposed Brain Circuit Computation”

5:00 p.m.
Dinner

6:30 p.m.
Poster Session

8:30 p.m.
Social Mixer

October 18, 2014

9:00 a.m.
Julijana Gjorgjieva, Marder Lab
"Theoretical principles underlying neural circuit development and sensory pathways diversification"

9:45 a.m.
Marc Nahmani, Turrigiano Lab
“Structure and function of an inhibitory circuit regulating critical period plasticity”

10:30 a.m.
Jennifer Gutsell, Department of Psychology
“Resonating with allies and competitors: A motivational approach to how the brain processes other’s inner states”

11:15 a.m.
Shantanu Jahdav, Department of Psychology
“Neural activity patterns required for learning and memory-guided behavior”

Noon
Lunch

2:00 p.m.
Departure

The Volen Retreat features an opportunity for all Volen-affiliated faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students to present a poster detailing their research. This is a forum for members of the community to engage with their fellow scientists and exchange ideas. The face-to-face format of a poster session allows for direct and detailed discussion of data and techniques.

This year, 23 postdoctoral fellows and students presented posters at the Volen Retreat. The presenters and titles are as follows:

• Daniel Acker & Marissa S. Kuzirian, Semaphorin4D Attenuates Seizure Severity in an in Vivo Mouse Model of Epilepsy
• Jonathan Cannon, Sequence Generation by Spatiotemporal Cycles of Inhibition
• Mugdha Deshpande & Josiah Herzog, Altered Dendrite Morphology and Growth Factor Signaling in Animal Models of ALS
• Yasmin Escobedo, Target-Cell Dependent Plasticity of Inhibitory Synapses in Mammalian Cortex
• Sarah Haddad, Various Modulatory Substances Differentially Affect Stable Rhythmic Output Across Temperature
• Vera Hapiak, The Molecular and Circuit Basis of Thermo Sensation in Caenorhabditis Elegans
• Anna Hartmann, Characterizing Behavioral Responses of Adult Nematodes to Pheromone
• Anne Joseph, CaMKIV: Queen of the Kinases
• Katelyn Kenny, The Activity Dependent GTPase Rem2 Negatively Regulates Dendritic Complexity in Response to Sensory Experience
• Zachary Knecht, Hygrosensation in Drosophila
• Chang Liu, Serotonergic Neurons Activity Re-Patterns Sleep Architecture in Drosophila
• Aoife McMahon, Hijacking an Editing Enzyme to Reveal the Targets of RNA-Binding Proteins
• Nate Miska, Synapse Type Specificity of Synaptic Scaling in Visual Cortical L4
• Timothy O’Leary, Temperature Robust Neural Activity from Feedback Control of Ion Channel Expression
• Sean O’Toole, Dicer Is Involved with Cortical Fast Spiking Interneuron Plasticity
• Adriane Otopalik & Philipp Rosenbaum, Spatial Mapping of Transmitter and Neuropeptide Responses in Single Identified Neurons
• Marjena Popovic, Effects of Visual Training on Population Activity in V1
• Sarah Richards, Knockout of Rem2 Impairs Experience Dependent Plasticity in Mouse Visual Cortex
• Asuka Takeishi, The AWC and ASI Sensory Neurons Contribute to Starvation-Dependent Plasticity in Thermotaxis Behavior
• Alexander Sutton, Quantifying Morphology of Stomatogastric Ganglion Neurons in C. Borealis

The M.R. Bauer Summer Science Research Fellowship Program completed its second summer in 2015. The M.R. Bauer Foundation generously supported Brandeis undergraduate Zoe Brown ’16. Brown was able to perform research in the laboratory of Volen Center for Complex Systems’ faculty member Art Wingfield. This opportunity allowed a very talented undergraduate to tackle an important question about how the brain processes speech. This summer’s experience will form the basis of Brown’s senior thesis. Below, Brown describes her summer 2015 research experience.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship was an invaluable experience. At the Memory and Cognition Lab at Brandeis University, I investigated the effect of speech prosody (word stress, pitch contour, and pauses) on speech recognition as measured by recall accuracy and, using pupillometry measurements, cognitive effort. For the duration of the fellowship, I ran all of the participants in the study and scored the data, and with the help of a graduate student, discussed how to analyze the data. Additionally, I made and presented a poster, “Examining the Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Prosody on Sentence Processing,” at SciFest, a poster session at Brandeis.

During the study, young adults were asked to listen to and recall sentences, half of which contained prosody congruent with the syntactic structure, and the other half of which had been computer-edited to place the prosody in conflict with the syntax. Recall accuracy was significantly lower for the incongruent condition than for the congruent condition. For the incongruent sentences, participants often shifted their responses to match the prosodic marking, which indicated that prosody often had a strong lure over the intended syntactic parse. To measure effort, pupil dilation was continuously recorded using an eye tracker and was time-locked to the sentences via MATLAB. Pupillometry data are currently being analyzed, and I expect that these data will provide a sensitive measure of cognitive effort. If so, as the incongruent condition produced more errors, there should be an overall larger pupil dilation, reflecting an increase in effort, for this condition.

Reading articles on previous research done on prosody and pupillometry, running each experiment, scoring and analyzing the data, and presenting the poster all helped strengthen my understanding of the conceptual basis of the project. It was very valuable to be able to work with the graduate student, the director of the lab (Art Wingfield), and other colleagues; the ability to obtain reliable results in a relatively short time period highlighted the importance of collaboration.

I am very grateful for this opportunity, and for the knowledge and experience I have gained from this fellowship. I am currently working on a follow- up study for this project. During the academic year, we plan to investigate whether age differences and hearing acuity affect the accuracy of recall and placement in the prosodic boundary in congruent and incongruent prosody. My long-term plans include graduate school and academic or clinical research, and this experience will be very helpful for my future plans.

As always, we thank the speakers who came to the Brandeis campus this past year to share their research with us and to engage us in many hours of stimulating discussion and exchanges of ideas with Volen Center faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows. We are also grateful to our visitors for forwarding to us their lecture summaries that form the basis of this report.

We especially acknowledge Kim MacKenzie, a past neuroscience PhD graduate, for her valuable contributions and editorial assistance in the preparation of this report.

The text of this summary of the Bauer Foundation series, along with summaries from previous years, can be found at Past Bauer Foundation Summaries.