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Contact name: Neuroscience Program
Contact email: nsp@life.illinois.edu

Title: "Applying dense-sampling methods to reveal dynamic endocrine modulation of the nervous system"

Speaker:  Emily Jacobs, Associate Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences Neuroscience Research Institute, University of California- Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California.

Sex hormones are powerful neuromodulators of learning and memory. Dr. Jacobs highlights recent findings from her lab suggesting that neuroendocrine factors rapidly and dynamically influence the human brain over the lifecourse.

Contact name: Anne McKinney
Contact email: amckinn@illinois.edu

Todd Coleman, Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, will lecture on “Monitoring and modulating nervous systems in the brain and visceral organs” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom September 28, 2022.  One of our MBM trainees will give an introduction.

The lecture is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program. Zoom details are below.

Abstract:

We will highlight recent technological and methodological advances in deploying miniaturized technologies that can monitor the electrophysiologic patterns of the visceral nervous system.  Specifically, we will showcase recent developments in biomedical signal processing that enable non-invasive tracking of the slow wave patterns associated with the neuromuscular activity of the stomach.

We will also describe recent developments of thin, stretchable, wireless biosensor patches that can be embedded within routinely used medical adhesives for ambulatory recording of these gastric electrophysiologic patterns.  We will illustrate how such systems can also be used in tandem with novel miniaturized pacing devices to enable closed-loop neuromodulation of the enteric nervous system.

We will also discuss recent efforts in exploring the electrophysiologic basis of the gut-brain axis with concurrent non-invasive electrophysiologic recordings of the brain and stomach. We will conclude with a summary of the knowns and unknowns in how multi-organ physiology research, technology miniaturization, and data science may create unique opportunities for the intersection of engineering, applied probability, neuroscience, and medicine.

Contact name: Benjamin Nussbaum
Contact email: bn9@illinois.edu

Title: "Nanoassembled quantum photonic devices with nanodiamond-based color centers"

Speaker: Prof. Simeon Bogdanov, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Abstract: Color centers in nanodiamonds coupled to nanophotonic structures feature unique properties to realize high-bandwidth quantum photonic devices. They exhibit photostable and narrowband single-photon emission. Their natural compatibility with plasmonic resonators unlocks a giant enhancement of light-matter interaction and enables photon emission rates in the GHz range. Color centers in nanodiamonds can be integrated into any robust photonic platform. However, varying sizes of nanodiamonds and the heterogenous properties of color centers pose fundamental challenges for device fabrication. Recent innovative methods for nanodiamond growth, large-scale screening, and deterministic nanoparticle transfer show promise for realizing nanodiamond-based quantum optical devices. We will zoom in on our recent demonstrations of rapid techniques for large-scale optical screening of quantum emitters, including machine-assisted confocal microscope focusing in a noisy environment and all-optical nanodiamond sizing.

Contact name: Lesley Butler
Contact email: lesleym@illinois.edu

Title: 

Advances in free-energy calculations at the dawn of exascale computing

Speaker: Chris Chipot, Adjunct Professor, Department of Biological Physics, The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France 

In recent years, free-energy calculations have emerged as an indispensable tool to bridge the gap between molecular dynamics simulations and biological events, and help tackle deep biological questions that experiment alone has left unresolved. In spite of spectacular advances on the hardware front, which have paved the way for brute-force molecular dynamics to time and size scales hitherto never attained, free-energy calculations represent a cogent alternative to access with unparalleled accuracy the thermodynamics and possibly the kinetics that underlie complex processes of the living. In this lecture, I will review recent developments for free-energy calculations of both alchemical and geometrical transformations. In particular, I will show how combination of importance-sampling schemes can be used profitably to map with unprecedented efficiency and without any loss of accuracy complex free-energy landscapes from whence physically meaningful transition pathways can be extracted. I will compare this strategy with an alternative route consisting of a path search in multidimensional space followed by a potential of mean force calculation along the putative minimum free-energy pathway. I will also show how GPU-acceleration can be harnessed to boost free-energy calculations of an alchemical nature, and, thus, allow large sets of mutations to be performed in a routine fashion on affordable platforms equipped with GPUs. I will close discussing the hurdles free-energy calculations have overcome in recent years, and the challenges they are facing as we are at the dawn of exascale computing.

Contact name: Stacy Olson
Contact email: srolson@illinois.edu
Contact phone: 217-244-8373

Join Director Nadya Mason and your colleagues this fall for informal conversation and coffee in the Beckman garden, which is west of the building through the café’s double doors.

This Gather in the Garden Series will be from 10-10:30 a.m. every Tuesday through the fall semester.

Contact name: Patty Jones
Contact email: pmjones5@illinois.edu

The Beckman Institute Responsible Conduct of Research Seminar Series is held on select Tuesdays throughout the fall semester on Zoom or in person. Tune in or come to room 5602 to learn from the experts about topics including scientific misconduct, data collection, animal and human subjects research, data privacy and security, and ethics in the research environment.

Topic: Human subjects research

Speaker: Jennifer Ford, an assistant director in the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects.

This meeting is free and open to the public. Register in advance on Zoom.

Contact name: Neuroscience Program
Contact email: nsp@life.illinois.edu

Title: "Integration of parallel ascending pathways in the primary and higher-order."

Speaker: Hiroyuki Kato, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Information flow in the cortex is classically considered as feedforward-hierarchical computation. However, recent findings have started to reveal rather parallel and distributed processing. Dr. Kato will discuss his team's work studying parallel sensory pathways across the primary and higher auditory cortices in extracting complex sound features.

Contact name: Chaimongkol Saengow
Contact email: saengow@illinois.edu

Two graduate students will present their research at the second Beckman Graduate Student Seminar of the fall 2022 semester: Winnie Chung, psychology; and Abhiroop Mishra, materials science and engineering.

The event takes place Wednesday, Oct. 5 at noon. Register in advance to attend in person or on Zoom.

Contact name: Anne McKinney
Contact email: amckinn@illinois.edu

Hee Jung Chung, Associate Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience at Illinois, will lecture on “The role of brain specific tyrosine phosphatase STEP in hippocampal excitability and seizures” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom October 5, 2022.  One of our MBM trainees will give an introduction.

The lecture is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program. Zoom details are below.

Hee Jung Chung completed her PhD at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research interests focus on neurological and behavioral disorders with an emphasis on the study of epilepsy.

The Chung Lab endeavors to understand how epilepsy mutations affect ion channel function and lead to hyperexcitability in inherited or de novo epilepsy, and identify molecular mechanisms that alter ion channels to cause hyperexcitability in acquired epilepsy. To investigate these two areas, they use interdisciplinary approaches including primary neuronal culture, live and fixed microscopy, biochemistry, electrophysiology, and mouse genetics.

Contact name: Stacy Olson
Contact email: srolson@illinois.edu
Contact phone: 217-244-8373

Beckman-Brown Lecture on Interdisciplinary Science

Professor Fei-Fei Li, Stanford University

2 p.m. CST Thursday, Oct. 6

Her virtual talk is titled, "From Seeing to Doing: Understanding and Interacting with the Real World." Visual intelligence is a cornerstone of intelligence. From passive perception to embodied interaction with the world, vision plays a critical role. In this talk, she will discuss work in the Li Group lab that spans both perception and robotic learning, underscoring the importance of an ‘ecological approach’ to learning. Register in advance on Zoom.

The annual Beckman-Brown Lecture on Interdisciplinary Science honors Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, the founder of the Institute, and Dr. Theodore “Ted” Brown, the founding director. The series is funded by a gift from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. Learn more.

Contact name: Lesley Butler
Contact email: lesleym@illinois.edu

Title: Coarse-grained modeling for nucleic acid nanotechnology.

Speaker: Petr Sulc, Assistant Professor, Center for Biological Physics, School of Molecular Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

DNA and RNA nanotechnology use designed nucleic acid strands to self- assemble large-scale nanostructures and devices. Computer simulations can provide valuable insights into their function but modeling such systems faces several challenges: The nucleic acid nanostructure assembly and function consists of rare events such as creation and breaking of base pairs, and their sizes are typically up to few thousands of nucleotides. Dr. Sulc will present a top-down coarse-grained model, oxDNA, which was specifically designed for simulations of DNA nanotechnology systems, and present examples where it has been used to help design and understand function of DNA, RNA and protein-DNA hybrid nanostructures and processes. In particular, Dr. Sulc will show the model's use to study of DNA origami tetrastack lattice design (a multicomponent nanostructure consisting of a million of nucleotides, with promising applications to metamaterial design), DNA and RNA strand displacement reaction (a fundamental mechanism in nucleic acid computing) and simulations of ATP-powered DNA leaf-spring engine. Dr. Sulc will also present our online browser-based tools for design of DNA and protein-DNA/RNA hybrid nanostructures and provide interactive in-browser simulations to help users design structures with desired function.

Contact name: Stacy Olson
Contact email: srolson@illinois.edu
Contact phone: 217-244-8373

Join Director Nadya Mason and your colleagues this fall for informal conversation and coffee in the Beckman garden, which is west of the building through the café’s double doors.

This Gather in the Garden Series will be from 10-10:30 a.m. every Tuesday through the fall semester.

Contact name: Patty Jones
Contact email: pmjones5@illinois.edu

The Beckman Institute Responsible Conduct of Research Seminar Series is held on select Tuesdays throughout the fall semester on Zoom or in person. Tune in or come to room 5602 to learn from the experts about topics including scientific misconduct, data collection, animal and human subjects research, data privacy and security, and ethics in the research environment.

Topic: Laboratory safety

Speaker: Stephanie Hess, a director in the Division of Research Safety.

This meeting is free and open to the public. Register in advance on Zoom.

Contact name: Neuroscience Program
Contact email: nsp@life.illinois.edu

Title: "Edge-centric connectomics."

Speaker: Richard Betzel, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, IU Network Science Institute, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana

Brains can be modeled as functional networks, where interregional connections and their weights are estimated as a correlations. Dr. Betzel will present an approach for exactly decomposing these connections (edges) into their time-varying contributions. This approach yields framewise estimates of networks across time and can be used to estimate the novel construct of "edge functional connectivity".

Contact name: Angela Dean
Contact email: aedean2@illinois.edu

Title: "Regulation of liver energy balance by nutrient sensing nuclear receptors"

Speaker: David Moore, Professor and chair, Department of Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California.

The liver is crucial for maintaining whole body energy balance. For example, it responds to fasting by secreting glucose and to feeding by both metabolizing it and storing it as glycogen. The nuclear receptors FXR and PPARα are activated in the fed or fasted liver, respectively, and regulate many basic metabolic processes. Dr. Moore's lab have found that both receptors also regulate processes that are not directly related to metabolic pathways but are central to liver energy balance. Dr. Moore's presentation will focus on the previously described roles of FXR and PPARα in control of autophagy and more recent results on control of the liver secretome. 

Contact name: Darin Doty
Contact email: ddoty@illinois.edu
Contact phone: 217-244-6553

Marianne Alleyne will speak at the Beckman Institute's virtual Director's Seminar at noon Thursday, Oct. 13. Alleyne, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology, will be discussing a topic to be decided. The seminar will be a hybrid event held in Beckman, room 1005 and via Zoom. A boxed lunch will be provided to those who register as in-person attendees. Please indicate whether you will attend virtually or in-person.

Contact name: Stacy Olson
Contact email: srolson@illinois.edu
Contact phone: 217-244-8373

Join Director Nadya Mason and your colleagues this fall for informal conversation and coffee in the Beckman garden, which is west of the building through the café’s double doors.

This Gather in the Garden Series will be from 10-10:30 a.m. every Tuesday through the fall semester.

Contact name: Patty Jones
Contact email: pmjones5@illinois.edu

The Beckman Institute Responsible Conduct of Research Seminar Series is held on select Tuesdays throughout the fall semester on Zoom or in person. Tune in or come to room 5602 to learn from the experts about topics including scientific misconduct, data collection, animal and human subjects research, data privacy and security, and ethics in the research environment.

Topic: Animal research

Speaker: Jiajie Jessica Xu, an assistant director, veterinarian, in the Division of Animal Resources

This meeting is free and open to the public. Register in advance on Zoom.

Contact name: Stacy Olson
Contact email: srolson@illinois.edu
Contact phone: 217-244-8373

Join Director Nadya Mason and your colleagues this fall for informal conversation and coffee in the Beckman garden, which is west of the building through the café’s double doors.

This Gather in the Garden Series will be from 10-10:30 a.m. every Tuesday through the fall semester.

Contact name: Patty Jones
Contact email: pmjones5@illinois.edu

The Beckman Institute Responsible Conduct of Research Seminar Series is held on select Tuesdays throughout the fall semester on Zoom or in person. Tune in or come to room 5602 to learn from the experts about topics including scientific misconduct, data collection, animal and human subjects research, data privacy and security, and ethics in the research environment.

Topic: Radiation safety

Speaker: Anja Metz, an assistant director and radiation safety officer at the Division of Research Safety

This meeting is free and open to the public. Register in advance on Zoom.

Join the Beckman community for an afternoon of fun while painting pumpkins.

Stop in between 1-3 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25, in the Beckman Institute Garden, which is located west of the café through the double doors.

Decorate a pumpkin for yourself or to be placed the atrium. Pumpkins and painting supplies will be provided. Registrants will be alerted of an alternative location in case of rain.

Faculty, staff and students and postdocs are encouraged to attend!

Contact name: Anne McKinney
Contact email: amckinn@illinois.edu

Sepideh Sadaghiani, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Illinois, will lecture on “The functional connectome across temporal scales” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom October 26, 2022.  One of our MBM trainees will give an introduction.

The lecture is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program. Zoom details are below.

Abstract:

The view of human brain function has drastically shifted over the last decade, owing to the observation that most brain activity is intrinsic rather than driven by external stimuli or cognitive demands. Specifically, all brain regions continuously communicate in spatiotemporally organized patterns that constitute the functional connectome, with consequences for cognition and behavior.

In this talk, I will argue that another shift is underway, driven by new insights from synergistic interrogation of the functional connectome using different acquisition methods. The human functional connectome is typically investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that relies on the indirect hemodynamic signal, thereby emphasizing very slow connectivity across brain regions. Conversely, more recent methodological advances demonstrate that fast connectivity within the whole-brain connectome can be studied with real-time methods such as electroencephalography (EEG).

Our findings show that combining fMRI with scalp or intracranial EEG in humans, especially when recorded concurrently, paints a multiplex picture of neural communication across the connectome. Specifically, the connectome comprises both fast, oscillation-based connectivity observable with EEG, as well as extremely slow processes best captured by fMRI. While the fast and slow processes share an important degree of spatial organization, these processes unfold in a temporally independent manner.

Our observations suggest that infraslow connectivity (measured in fMRI) and rapid connectivity of various frequency bands (measured by EEG) constitute multiple dynamic trajectories through a shared state space of discrete connectome configurations. The multitude of flexible trajectories may enable any given brain region to 

concurrently