Neuroscience News | January 2016

Spring Neuroscience Workshop
Clinical & Translational Neuroscience Is Online
Mayo SURFs Chosen
2015 Society for Neuroscience Meeting

Welcome to the first Clinical & Translational Neuroscience newsletter! Each month we will update you on interesting neuroscience events, stories and funding opportunities. This is a great way to find out more about the neuroscience community and identify ways to further build your own neuroscience collaborations.

As you will see from this month’s newsletter, there is a lot happening within this program area of IHSI. We are hosting our first workshop on April 9, 2016. We have a new presence on the IHSI website. We are maintaining an online calendar of neuroscience-related grant opportunities. And we are committed to supporting neuroscience-specific educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students across campus. Keep reading below for more on all these topics.

If you have something to share with the neuroscience community at Illinois, email Gillian Cooke, research development specialist. or call (217) 300-6709.

RESEARCH

Spring 2016 Neuroscience Workshop | SAVE THE DATE

Getting to know each other is very important, for that reason the inaugural Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Workshop will take place on Saturday, April 9, 2016 at Carle's Pollard Auditorium in Urbana. All faculty, staff, postdocs, and students are invited to take part. The conference talks will be centered on these themes:

• Traumatic Brain Injury
• Aging and Dementia
• Neuro-Engineering

The workshop will feature two keynote speakers: David Bennett, MD, of Rush University Medical Center's Religious Orders Study; and Gordon Buchanan, MD, PhD, neurologist and professor at the University of Iowa.

There will be several networking opportunities throughout the day, giving everyone a chance to meet neuroscience colleagues from across campus and even off-campus. Be on the lookout for online registration and more details in next month's newsletter.

Clinical & Translational Neuroscience is Online

Our webpages are live! Stop by and explore the online resources IHSI is building for the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience community. For example, did you know that IHSI has a grants calendar for neuroscience-related funding? As you’ll see, there is an extensive list of funding opportunities from a wide range of sources. We have included information about deadlines, funding ceilings, eligibility, and links to the original request for applications. This is a great way to keep track of immediate and future funding opportunities. One example of this is the Human Frontier Science Program, an international program of research support, funding frontier research on the complex mechanisms of living organisms.

Another great example of IHSI supporting researchers in the clinical and translational neuroscience community is our “Get Involved With Neuroscience” page. If you have an active webpage with details about the studies you are recruiting for, we can advertise it on our site! As our community grows, additional resources will be built, creating more possibilities for researchers to come together and find solutions to some of today’s most pressing societal health challenges in clinical and translational neuroscience, so stay tuned.

EDUCATION

Mayo Clinic Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships

Through the Mayo Clinic and University of Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare, Illinois undergraduate students interested in clinical and translational neuroscience had the opportunity to be part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Florida. For summer 2016, two spots in this highly-successful program are exclusively reserved for University of Illinois undergraduates in their sophomore or junior year, focusing on neuroscience.

Congratulations to Maria Mihailescu (School of Molecular and Cellular Biology) and Shreya Santhanam (Department of Bioengineering), the two undergraduates selected to participate as SURFs at the Mayo Clinic in Florida in 2016!

Maria and Shreya will work with either Nilufer Ertekin-Taner, MD, PhD, a neurogeneticist focused on the complex genetics of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative diseases; or William D. Freeman, MD, a neurologist interested in intracranial hemorrhage, specifically subarachnoid hemorrhage, and management of patients with neurological disorders in the intensive care unit and hospital.

Check back for a report of Maria and Shreya’s experience in the fall.

Illinois Researchers Represent at 2015 Society for Neuroscience Meeting

The 45^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) took place October 17-21, 2015, at McCormick Place convention center in Chicago, Illinois. The annual meeting is the premier event for neuroscientists from all over the world, with more than 30,000 attendees from 80 countries present. The 2015 SfN Meeting included special lectures by world-renowned scientists, over 15,000 abstracts, a symposia and mini-symposia with coverage of neuroscience research topics, and more than 600 exhibitors showcasing new tools, technologies, and publishing opportunities. Hillary Schwarb, a postdoctoral research associate in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Beckman Institute, and attendee of the 2015 SfN Meeting, spoke about the kinds of opportunities the meeting presents for neuroscience students and researchers at the U of I.

“Sometimes these conferences are the first time you get to talk about your work with your peers from other universities. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to see what other people are actively working on and how that work intersects with the work that you are doing,” Schwarb said.

Schwarb presented a poster entitled, Structural and Functional Contributions to Context-Dependent Relational Memory. For her research, she and her colleagues used two different types of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffuse tensor imaging (DTI). Her group found that relational memory successes are associated with activation in the hippocampus. These results show separable contributions of prefrontal and hippocampal brain areas in support of successful performance in memory tasks. 

For Schwarb, the meeting was successful because she was able to speak with researchers whose data was related to the data she presented.

“Converging findings from multiple methodologies is always exciting, and helps to develop a deeper understanding of the richness of the data and how it fits within the bigger picture,” she said.

The 2016 Society for Neuroscience Meeting will be held November 12-16, 2016, in San Diego, California.

IMPORTANT DATES AND DEADLINES

• Spring Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Workshop: April 9, 2016
• Neuroscience Program (NSP) Brain Awareness Day: April 16, 2016, 1-5 p.m., Orpheum Children's Science Museum, Champaign, IL

If you have an announcement or event to share with the neuroscience community at Illinois, email Gillian Cooke, IHSI research development specialist.