Congratulations to Thomas Burnett (graduate student in the O'Connor/Nielsen lab) and Gian Molina-Castro (graduate student in the Bergles lab) for being inducted into the Johns Hopkins University 2022 class of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society!  Only 5 graduate students from all of Johns Hopkins were chosen for this prestigious honor! 

Thomas and Gian will be officially inducted at the national ceremony at the National Bouchet Honor Society Induction Ceremony and Conference hosted by Yale University (this year virtually), on April 7-8, 2022.

Johns Hopkins will have an induction ceremony with the JHU President and Provost on May 17th 2022. 

Dr. David Linden, primary member of the Neuroscience Department, writes candidly in The Atlantic about his cancer diagnosis, and how this altered his perspective of the mind. The article is written with Dr. Linden's typical humor and insights about life and neuroscience. 

As Dr. Linden himself says "It’s not actually quite as much of a big, bad bummer as the title would suggest.  Please do give it a look."

Link to the article in The Atlantic:  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/terminal-cancer-neuroscientist-prepares-death/621114/

 Also hear Dr. Linden on the January 17th episode of Here & Now on NPR. 
 Dr. Linden's segment starts at 10:54: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1073614138/1073646872

Congratulations to Dr. Alex Kolodkin, a primary member in the Neuroscience Department, for being awarded a Research to End Blindness Stein Innovation Award!

The Stein Award from the RPB provides unrestricted funding focused on visual system research in health and disease.  Dr. Kolodkin is one of 40 researchers who have received the award since it was established in 2014. Research in Dr. Kolodkin’s laboratory funded by this RBP award will be focused on investigating novel roles of mechcanotransduction channels in visual system development and in inherited diseases that compromise eye movement in response to image motion.

More information about RPB grants program can be found here:  www.rpbusa.org

Information about the RPB Stein Innovation Award can be found here: https://www.rpbusa.org/rpb/grants-and-research/grants/grants-for-individuals/stein-innovation-awards/

Congrats to Gian Molina-Castro, a Neuroscience PhD student in Dr. Dwight Bergles lab, for winning a 2021 Career Impact Award!  

Tune into the Career Impact Awards Ceremony on December 2, 2021 @ 1:00 p.m. (ET).  Register to attend on Zoom here!

Congratulations to our Neuroscience Grad students who passed their Graduate Oral Exams! 

Chris Seong Yeol An,
Riley Bannon,
Matilde Castro,
Daniel Daudelin,
Aleksander Geske,
Eric Hsu,
Hsin-Yi Hung,
Pelin Ozel,
Alina Spiegel,
Charles Walters,
Tiger Yu Kang Xu

The White Coat Ceremony on October 29th can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nG_3VNs4z0

Neuroscience students are coated at 56:15. 

Congratulations to Gian Molina-Castro, Graduate Student in Dwight Bergles' lab, who has been awarded a Diversity Leadership Award, one of 14 awarded across the University by the Diversity Leadership Council. 

Here is the link to the Hub article which also includes a link to register for the Awards Ceremony at 3 pm on Tuesday, September 28 (today).  

https://hub.jhu.edu/at-work/2021/09/24/dlc-awards/

By Varun Chokshi and Daniel O’Connor 

Originally published in FUNDAMENTALS AUGUST 2021

Congratulations to Dr. Angelika Doetzlhofer, a primary faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience, for being chosen as the winner of the 2021 Hamilton Smith Award for Innovative Research!  

Congratulations to the following graduate student and postdoctoral members of the Neuroscience Department for their Young Investigators’ Day awards!
https://hopkinsyidp.org

Congratulations to Dr. Daeyeol Lee, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and Psychological and Brain Sciences, for being selected as the 2021 recipient of the Samsung Ho-am Prize in Medicine!    

News story: http://www.hoamfoundation.org/eng/award/thisyear_view.asp?idx=442

Distinguished Professor Daeyeol Lee is an international authority in neuroscience. Professor Lee identified neural mechanisms of decision-making by incorporating economics into neuroscientific research using nonhuman primates as subjects. Widely considered the father of neuroeconomics, he integrated a range of academic disciplines that improve understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders and offer more possibilities for treatment.

Congratulations to Riley Bannon, a Neuroscience Graduate student in Dr. Peter Calabresi's lab, for being selected for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award!  

Dr. Gul Dolen's work on octopuses was highlighted in Scientific American. Check it out!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-octopus-could-be-the-next-model-organism/

Congratulations to Dr. Dwight Bergles, a primary member of the Neuroscience Department, who is the 2020 winner of the Barancik Prize for Innovation in MS Research.

Full details in the link. 

Lionel Rodriguez, a Neuroscience grad student in the Martinowich lab, discusses implicit bias in this interview with SfN. 

Article:Why Conversation and Community are Important to Stopping Bias  

Congratulations to Dr. Alex Kolodkin, Primary member in the Neuroscience Department, for being elected into the National Academy of Medicine today!

Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Alex Kolodkin, PhD, Charles J. Homcy and Simeon G. Margolis Professor, Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore. For his leadership in neural development research relating to the establishment of neuronal connectivity. He is known for his work on neuronal guidance cues and their receptors, the discovery of semaphorins, and unveiling guidance cue roles in neural circuit assembly and function in insects and mammals.

Full article: https://nam.edu/national-academy-of-medicine-elects-100-new-members-2020/

Deputy Director of Neuroscience Ph.D. Training Program

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

The Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience seeks applicants for the new position of Deputy Director of the Neuroscience Training Program (NTP). The NTP is one of the top neuroscience Ph.D programs in the world.  Based in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the program includes approximately 80 students and 73 faculty members from 14 departments across the broader university. The Deputy Director reports to the Program Director(s) and represents the Director(s) in many facets of the program. The Deputy Director has three areas of responsibilities: Leadership (50%), Academic (35%) , and Administrative (15%).

The lab of Dr. Seth Blackshaw Professor of Neuroscience in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience published a paper in Science that maps out the network of genes that controls the ability of retinal neurons to regenerate from glial support cells. 

The paper’s lead authors, Thanh Hoang and Jie Wang, comprehensively analyzed changes in gene action that occur in retinal glial cells following injury three species – zebrafish, chickens and mice – which differ in their ability to generate retinal neurons in response to injury.  Zebrafish can robustly regenerate neurons, newly hatched chicks can do so weakly and mice, like humans, cannot do so at all.  This study found that retinal glial cells from all three species transition to an activated stage following injury, and that this is required for glia to be able to generate neurons in zebrafish and chicks, but identified a gene regulatory network in mice that actively blocked this process.  By inactivating NFI family transcription factors, which are part of this network, Blackshaw’s group was able to induce mouse glia to generate retinal neurons.  This demonstrates that mammals possess a latent ability to regenerate neurons lost to injury and disease, and that this can be awakened by disrupting genes in this network.  This approach may be useful in cell-based therapies aimed at restoring retinal neurons lost due to blinding diseases.

Gene regulatory networks controlling vertebrate retinal regeneration 
Science  01 Oct 2020
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/30/science.abb8598 

We in the Department of Neuroscience are horrified and deeply saddened by recent events that highlight the longstanding racism entrenched in our society. Shocking episodes of racial violence across the nation have galvanized efforts to root out the systemic biases that enable these atrocities to recur. We strongly support these goals.