BBI Seed Grant Symposium
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
1:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.
1103 Bioscience Research Building
For More Information:
https://forms.gle/vP5erAvvDb3ZJEBP9

Please join us on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 2, 2023 for the BBI's annual Seed Grant Symposium and Kavli Distinguished Speaker Series! Hear about BBI-funded research from 2022 and 2023 BBI seed grant award teams followed by a keynote from Dr. Seth Blackshaw (Johns Hopkins University). RSVP at the link below. A tentative agenda follows:

Symposium Welcome (1:00 – 1:05 p.m.) – Dr. Elizabeth Quinlan, Director, Brain and Behavior Institute

Cellular & Molecular Projects

The aging proteome in accelerated Alzheimer's disease progression (1:05 – 1:10 p.m.) – Drs. Kan Cao, Peter Nemes 

Identifying cell type and subcompartment-specific defects in gene regulation underlying multimodal sensory defects in neurodevelopmental disease (1:15 – 1:20 p.m.) – Drs. Colenso Speer, Lisa Taneyhill

Machine learning and quantum materials-enabled early detection of Alzheimer’s disease with exosomes isolated from human iPSCs-derived hippocampal neurons (1:25 – 1:45 p.m.) – Drs. Xiaoming (Shawn) He, Cheng Gong

Cytoskeletal excitability and network dynamics in Alzheimer’s and other age-related neurological diseases (1:50 – 2:10 p.m.) – Drs. Kan Cao, Wolfgang Losert 

Remarks (2:15 – 2:20 p.m.) – Dr. Jennifer King Rice, Senior Vice President and Provost

Complex Systems Projects

Cortical mechanisms underlying auditory dysfunction in autism spectrum disorder (2:20 – 2:25 p.m.) – Drs. Nikolas Francis, Behtash Babadi

Development of an optogenetics-fMRI system to study the mouse brain: Application to the study of large-scale networks involved in fear and anxiety from adolescence to adulthood (2:30 – 2:35 p.m.) – Drs. Luiz Pessoa, Konstantin Cherkas

Machine learning analyses of audiological data to predict age-related declines in hearing and cognition (2:40 – 3:00 p.m.) – Drs. Matthew Goupell, Michael P. Cummings

Cognition & Human Neuroimaging Projects

Toward a non-linguistic measure of auditory processing deficits in older and younger monolingual and bilingual adults (3:15 – 3:20 p.m.) – Drs. Jonathan Simon, Nick Pandža, Samira Anderson

Toward an adaptive view of neural synchrony: Assessing moment-to-moment dynamics during caregiver-child brain-to-brain synchrony in majority-BIPOC, low-SES dyads (3:25 – 3:30 p.m.) – Drs. Rachel Romeo, Christopher Metzler, Eliza Thompson

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia as a biomarker of anxiety in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (3:35 – 3:55 p.m.) – Drs. Heather Yarger, Angel Dunbar, Elizaberth Redcay

Neurocognitive mechanisms of sentence production in aging and stroke (4:00 – 4:20 p.m.) – Drs. Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah, L. Robert Slevc

BBI-Kavli Distinguished Seminar (4:30 – 5:45 p.m.)

Introduction by Dr. Juan Angueyra, Assistant Professor, Biology

Control of neurogenic competence in retinal glia 

Dr. Seth Blackshaw, Professor of Neuroscience, Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: The Blackshaw group uses comparative single-cell multiomic analysis to identify gene regulatory networks that control neurogenesis and cell fate specification in developing retina and hypothalamus, as well as those that control neurogenic competence in retinal and hypothalamic glial cells. By integrating these findings, the Blackshaw lab aims to develop methods of replacing photoreceptors lost due to hereditary retinal dystrophies and of therapeutically modifying hypothalamic neural circuits that control essential physiological processes.  In this talk, Dr. Blackshaw will focus on recent progress in identifying gene regulatory networks that repress neurogenesis in retinal glia and genes that promote photoreceptor specification.

Reception (5:45 – 7:00 p.m.)