Neuroscience Graduate Program

Thomas Serre, Assistant Professor, Neuroscience Graduate Program and Department of Cognitive, Linguistics and Psychological Sciences, and colleagues at MIT have developed a computer-based system to identify and classify mouse behavior from assessing video records.  The system could have application for neuroscience research and pharma development needed to quantify behavior over long-periods without need for human intervention.  The works was published in Nature Communications (volume 1, page 68, 2010).  Link to the URL appearing below for a new release from Brown’s Public Affairs unit.

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/09/mice

Congratulations to Michael J. Frank, Neuroscience Graduate Program and Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, who received the inaugural Janet Taylor Spence Award at the May meeting of the Association for Psychological Sciences (APS).  APS started this award to recognize outstanding work by promising young researchers, and in addition to Prof. Frank named four others to receive the first-time award: David Amodio, NYU; James Coan, University of Virgina; Elizabeth Kessinger, Boston College; and Jason Mitchell, Harvard University. Prof. Frank received the Spence award for his work on brain mechanisms of learning and decision making.  A fuller description of the award and the inaugural recipients can be found at the following URL.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/publications/observer/2010/april-10/congratulations-to-the-2010-janet-taylor-spence-award-recipients.html

Congratulations to Jennifer Barredo who will soon activate (November 16th) a prestigious NIH NRSA pre-doctoral fellowship to support her work, with David Badre, on the function of prefrontal cortex.  Her project title is: “PFC-MTL lnteractions During Controlled Episodic Retrieval.”  Jennifer joins several current NSGP students who have received an NRSA pre-doctoral fellowship: Summer Allen, Julia Najera, Ceci Phillips, and Timothy Zolnik, along with a mystery person who should soon receive official notification of an NRSA award.

Congratulations to Kristin Kerr who won a travel award to attend the SfN meeting in San Diego.  Kristin is a fifth year graduate student and works with Rebecca Burwell; she has published five papers, two with Prof. Burwell, three from work done before arriving at Brown in 2006.