Update us on Your Research!

[Sam Staples]

Provide the SfN Community with an update on your research. Share any new findings or future plans that have impacted your research.

[valeria muoio]

I'm involved in the last two months in 2 new projects

The first, we are developing 3D printing models for motor training in children with cerebral palsy . We are working together with the engineering school to develop inexpensive and effective models that can be offered in low-income regions.

The second is that we are studying motor neuron recruitment in children before and after neurostimulation procedures (invasive and non-invasive). We want to quantify neuronal density and activity and correlate it with motor improvement

Both projects end up complementing each other and I hope that by the end of this year we will be observing the results of these protocols

 

[Hugo Sanchez-Castillo]

Hello scienmigos!!! 

We are involved in participation of the periacueductal gray matter in the alcohol intake, we expecting the publication of this paper soon: Involvement of NPY-Y1 receptors
in periaqueductal gray on anxiety, and food, sucrose, and alcohol consumption in pre-exposed Wistar rats

We are studing the differential particiaption of the mGlur1 and mGlur5 glutamatergic receptors in males and females after chronic stress.

Almost done, besides we are doing some timing research with stress and immediate time perception.

And finally Im actualizing my social skills and popular knowledge watching famous tv series!! (I didnt see any for many years)

[Jayalakshmi Viswanathan]

Dear fellow neuro-lovers,

A few years ago, after my post-doctoral fellowship ended and I was thinking about next steps, I started working in Program Development as a contractor at the National Institute on Aging. While I do not really participate in bench research directly anymore in this capacity, I still do a lot of research and contribute to journal articles (mostly reviews). A big project I work on is trying to address, if you will, the "modifiable" factors to improve the research infrastructure supporting the transition of promising candidate therapeutics through the translational pipeline to the clinic - in other words, overcoming the "valley of death" in translational research. In order to do so, a lot of my research revolves around meta-analyses of the research landscape - how rigorously are studies being conducted? Are they being balanced for sex? Are studies reporting null results as often as they do promising data.... The list goes on. As a curator of the Alzheimer's Preclinical Efficacy Database (AlzPED, https://alzped.nia.nih.gov/), we do this precisely - curate individual article, evaluate them for rigor and reproducibility, and then analyze the reporting patterns as a whole to identify the trends in the research landscape. Our analysis demonstrates that critical elements of rigor are frequently absent from published studies (yes, even from 2023!) which is preventable and diminishes the predictive value of these mostly publicly funded studies. Our focus has been to therefore encourage the research community to adopt principles of rigor, open science and data sharing, and transparent reporting practices to address these modifiable barriers to the discovery of therapeutics for neurodegenerative disorders.

I've also been focused on working on several personal research projects of mine. I have been working on my next book, a follow-up to Baby Senses. This has been taking a lot of my time outside of work but I've been excited to pursue this work. I have also been working on developing a suite of educational tools for neuroscience outreach!

If you have any questions or comments about my research, I'd be delighted to chat more about it and will be at SfN this year - I look forward to conversations with all of you!