Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science
Community Spotlights
News from Carney
Community Spotlight: Anda Chirila
New faculty member Anda Chirila is no stranger to Brown. In the lab of former Carney affiliate Julie Kauer, Chirila earned a PhD studying synaptic signaling and how it contributes to pain. Now, she is advancing work she began as a postdoc at Harvard: integrating molecular-genetic tools and electrophysiology with computational, anatomical and behavioral approaches to study circuits involved in touch and pain processing.
Community Spotlight: Jay Gopal
Jay Gopal is enrolled in Brown’s Program in Liberal Medical Education, which combines undergraduate and medical school education. A researcher in the Serre Lab, Gopal is creating human-aligned deep neural networks and leading the design and development of ClickMe, an object recognition game with thousands of online users who are creating a massive AI training set. He is also co-founder of a medical software startup.
Community Spotlight: Ellie Pavlick
Ellie Pavlick is the associate chair of the Department of Computer Science, and a Carney collaborator on artificial intelligence projects that involve natural language processing - a technology that makes chatbots possible. How language works, in humans and machines, is Pavlick's central scientific fascination.
Community Spotlight: Debbie Yee
Yee is a recipient of a competitive NIH Pathway to Independence Award, or K99/R00, which gives postdocs five years of financial support to help them transition into a tenure-track faculty position. Along with postdoc Darcy Diesburg, Yee this fall organized a retreat for Carney postdocs to build community and share resources.
Tongyin Zheng: Decoding ALS
Tongyin Zheng is a postdoctoral scientist working in the Fawzi lab.
Community Spotlight: Sophie Brown
Sophie Brown is a 4th year graduate student working in the Borton lab.
Community Spotlight: Bahati Nkera
Bahati Nkera is a 5th year graduate student working in the Barnea lab.
Community Spotlight: Elena Luchkina
Elena Luchkina is a research scientist at Harvard University working with Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. She is also a research associate at UC Berkeley where she collaborates with Dr. Fei Xu. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University under the supervision of Drs. James Morgan and Dave Sobel in 2019 and completed postdoctoral training with Dr. Sandra Waxman at Northwestern University.
Community Spotlight: Arif Hamid
Arif Hamid is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.
Community Spotlight: Michael Lepori
Michael Lepori is a second-year graduate student working in the LUNAR lab and Serre Lab.
Community Spotlight: Darcy Diesburg
Darcy Diesburg is a postdoctoral fellow in the neuroscience department and works in the lab of Stephanie Jones.
Community Spotlight: Saud Alhusaini
Saud Alhusaini (M.D. Ph.D.) is an assistant professor in the Department of neurology within the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University and a movement disorders specialist practicing at Rhode Island Hospital.
Robyn St. Laurent: Rewiring the OCD Brain
Robyn St. Laurent is postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown in 2019.
Community Spotlight: Chloe Zimmerman
Chloe Zimmerman is an M.D./Ph.D. Candidate in Neuroscience working in Stephanie Jones and Frederike Petzschner’s labs.
Nikos Tapinos: Harnessing the Power of Glial Cells
Nikos Tapinos is an associate professor in the department of neurosurgery and Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox associate professor of ophthalmology and visual science.
Matt Nassar: Exploring Memory’s Complexity
Matt Nassar is an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience. He is the principal investigator in the Learning, Memory & Decision lab which uses computational models to better understand how the brain represents and stores information for effective decision making.
Community Spotlight: Sofia B. Lizarraga
Sofia B. Lizarraga, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry.
Community Spotlight: Michael A. Long
Michael A. Long, Ph.D. 2003, is a professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Community Spotlight: Ted Huey
Ted Huey is the director of the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital, an affiliate of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Community Spotlight: Nina Gray
Nina Gray earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Brown University in 2006. She is the Assistant Vice Provost for Research at New York University.
Community Spotlight: Heather McCrea
Heather McCrea graduated from Brown University in 2002 with an ScB in Biochemistry. She is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Holtz Children's Hospital/Jackson Health System and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Miami.
Community Spotlight Sonia Mayoral
Sonia Mayoral is an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and an assistant professor of brain science at the Carney Institute of Brain Science.
Community Spotlight: Daphna Buchsbaum
Daphna Buchsbaum is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She directs the Computational Cognitive Development Lab and its sister lab, the Brown Dog Lab.
Community Spotlight: Yu-Wen Alvin Huang
Yu-Wen Alvin Huang is the GLF Translational Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry, joining the faculty of Brown Biology and Medicine in July, 2019.
Community Spotlight: Jonghwan Lee
Jonghwan Lee is an Assistant Professor of Engineering and an Assistant Professor of Brain Science. He leads a research group leelab.ai at the intersection of medical photonics, neural engineering, and artificial intelligence.
Community Spotlight: Lori Daiello
Lori Daiello spent the first decade of her career working as a clinical consultant pharmacist in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. She says observing the devastating effects of late-stage Alzheimer’s disease on patients and the prolonged suffering of their families and caregivers was the most impactful experience of her professional life.
Community Spotlight: Eve Glenn
Eve Glenn is on a mission to better understand addiction and to help create more effective treatments for alcohol and substance use disorders.
Community Spotlight: Ahmed Abdelfattah
For neuroscientist Ahmed Abdelfattah, brain science is simply exciting. He believes that with the right tools scientists can shine light on previously unknown brain processes, getting one step closer to demystifying brain function at cellular and network levels.
Carpenter named president-elect of the Society for Biological Psychiatry
Dr. Linda Carpenter was named president-elect of the Society for Biological Psychiatry at the society’s annual meeting this month.
Community Spotlight: Priya Bhanot
Millions of people in the United States are suffering from substance use disorder. Approximately 60,000 people nationwide are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease each year. A Brown University undergraduate student is on a mission to understand the link between substance use disorder and Parkinson’s disease in an attempt to meet the country’s growing health care needs.
Community Spotlight: Oriel FeldmanHall
The Society for NeuroEconomics honored Oriel FeldmanHall, Manning Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, with their Early Career Award at the society’s virtual annual meeting in October.
Community Spotlight: Stephanie Jones
Brown University computational neuroscientist Stephanie Jones has received the BIOMAG2020 Mid-Career Award for her transformative contributions to the field of biomagnetism research.
Community Spotlight: Sara Zeppilli
Sara Zeppilli first discovered neuroscience in her native Italy eight years ago. Now, she is a graduate student at Brown University and the first author of a study that lays the foundation for understanding the evolution of olfactory sensory processing across species.
Community Spotlight: Deborah Murphy
When the COVID-19 crisis sent Brown University’s staff, faculty and students home to facilitate social distancing, Deborah Murphy fired up her sewing machine and stitched more than 100 protective masks for family, friends and members of the Carney Institute for Brain Science community.
Community Spotlight: Monica Linden
It’s 11 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 21, when Monica Linden, a senior lecturer of neuroscience at Brown University, rings a bell and asks her students to close their eyes, take a deep breath and focus on their posture.
Community Spotlight: Jason Ritt
Neuroscientist Jason Ritt is on a mission to assess the depth of brain science potential at Brown University, and to find ways to facilitate the sharing of ideas and methods across laboratories.
Community Spotlight: Judy Liu
Neurologist Judy Liu spends a good portion of her time caring for patients with severe neurological conditions. But when Liu steps into her lab at Brown University, she is particularly interested in a single condition: epilepsy.
Community Spotlight: E. Javier López Soto
E. Javier López Soto, a postdoctoral research associate in Brown University’s Lipscombe Lab, was discussing an experiment with an undergraduate student in March when he received a long-awaited phone call from the Warren Alpert Foundation.
Community Spotlight: Kathleen Gerlach
Kathleen Gerlach left her brand new office at Sidney Frank Hall in 2010 to take on a new challenge at the then small, yet rapidly growing Brown Institute for Brain Science.
Community Spotlight: Kate O'Connor-Giles
Complex organisms are built from simple starting blocks, and, for Brown University neuroscientist Kate O’Connor-Giles, the brain is the most fascinating piece in this puzzle.
Community Spotlight: Mark Homer Ph.D.'14
My name is Mark Homer, and I went to MIT for a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, but got really interested in operations research, algorithms and modeling of complex systems.
Community Spotlight: Gaïa-Marie Gerbaka (2018 UTRA)
I was particularly interested in Physics, Biology, and Mathematics with a strong emphasis on subjects such as Neuroscience, Electricity, and Mathematic Modeling.
Community Spotlight: Ethan Mok (2018 UTRA)
Even in high school I was extremely interested in neuroengineering and neuroscience, as well as wearable electronics and assistive technologies of various forms. I also enjoyed writing a fair amount.
Community Spotlight: Katerina Rademacher (2018 UTRA)
In high school I was very STEM oriented, but also took literary arts classes. I actually began to take an interest in neuroscience because my high school biology classes covered it so little.
Community Spotlight: Henry Jones (2018 UTRA)
In high school I was interested in chemistry, literature, and math.
Community Spotlight: Nancy Nkoudou (2018 UTRA)
My academic interests in high school surrounded physics and engineering- in fact, my favorite class was PHYSENG, a course that gave students the chance to apply what we learned about classical mechanics and electromagnetism to engineering projects.
Community Spotlight: Gabriela Batista (2018 UTRA)
In high school I was interested in Biology and Psychology, although I always really loved English classes as well.
Community Spotlight: David Brandman
I'm a post-doctoral research fellow with the department of engineering, under the supervision of Drs. Hochberg and Simeral.
Community Spotlight: Alycia Mosley Austin
I am Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program and Assistant Dean of Recruitment and Diversity Initiatives at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School.
Community Spotlight: Amitai Shenhav
Amitai Shenhav, PhD is Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Dr. Shenhav joined Brown and BIBS in August 2016.