BRAIN initiative to include U. faculty
President Obama announced the launch of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative Tuesday, stating that the federal government would devote around $100 million to the project in fiscal year 2014, according to the White House blog.
Professor of Neuroscience John Donoghue PhD’79 P’09 P’12 MD’16 and Professor of Engineering Arto Nurmikko traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the announcement, according to a University press release.
Donoghue will serve on a team of advisers to help National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins oversee the direction of the initiative, according to the press release.
Donoghue was part of a team of scientists who submitted a proposal to the government for a project that would map the neurons in the human brain, The Herald previously reported.
The goal of the team’s proposed project was to fill “the gap in our knowledge in understanding the brain,” Donoghue previously told The Herald.
In his announcement, Obama named the organizations that will lead the BRAIN project, which include the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. Private-sector partners will also contribute to the project.
“As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away. We can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears,” Obama said in his speech.
Study finds increased minority enrollment in PhD programs
The University’s Initiative to Maximize Student Development — a program to improve enrollment and performance of underrepresented PhD students in the life sciences — has proven effective, according to new research published in the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education last month.
Andrew Campbell, associate professor of medical science who served as the lead author of the study, began developing the program in 2006, according to a University press release.
Part of Campbell’s strategy to attract underrepresented minority students to Brown involved creating partnerships with colleges with high populations of underrepresented minority students, according to the press release.
In addition to recruiting students from these colleges, Brown professors also analyzed their curricula to identify potential gaps in these students’ knowledge bases. They were then able to develop graduate courses to help students gain missing skills, according to the press release.
In the 2007-08 school year — the year before the initiative began — only 17 percent of University doctoral students in the life sciences belonged to underrepresented minority groups. By the 2011-12 school year, that figure climbed to 23 percent, compared to a national average of about 10 percent, according to the press release.
The academic performance of minority students has also improved in the years since the program’s implementation, the study reported.
Exposure to meth alters stress response
Researchers at Brown and other universities discovered that toddlers whose mothers used methamphetamine while pregnant may have reduced responses to stress.
Their study will be published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs next month.
To determine toddlers’ response to stress, researchers left them in a room without their caregiver for three minutes. Such separation typically invokes stress in young children, according to the study.
Researchers then analyzed saliva samples from more than 120 2-year-olds who had gone through the procedure in order to measure their levels of cortisol, a hormone typically released in response to stress.
They found that most toddlers who had both been exposed to meth in utero and had signs of “strife” in their lives had “blunted” responses to stress, according to an article on the Medical News website.
“It’s not the meth alone,” said Barry Lester, director of the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk and senior author of the study, in the article. “It’s the combination of meth exposure and adversity after birth. We see other things coming into play — the mother’s psychological health, alcohol use, exposure to violence at home or in the community. The postnatal environment is hugely important.”
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