Come celebrate the end of the Fall semester.  Neuroscience faculty, students, staff and those working with the program are encouraged to attend.  Food and drinks will be available.

Dr. Jon-Fredrik Nielsen, Research Associate Professor in the fMRI laboratory at University of Michigan, will lecture on, "Harmonizing MRI data acquisition with Pulseq: Why, how, and current state of the field."

 Abstract: A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment is fundamentally very simple: It consists of radiofrequency (RF) and quasi-static magnetic fields that vary in time according to a desired schedule. The hardware to make that happen is ubiquitous and available from several commercial vendors, with nearly identical performance specifications across vendors. Unfortunately, the high degree of harmonization that exists on the hardware side is not matched on the software side: The programming interfaces that allow the sequence designer to control the time-varying magnetic fields are unique to each vendor and difficult to learn, which has (1) resulted in MRI protocols (pulse sequences) that cannot be ported between vendor platforms or even described accurately to a third party, (2) slowed down new pulse sequence development by creating “siloed” developer communities with a high barrier to entry, and (3) made it difficult to know if any observed differences in MRI measurements between sites is due to true biological variation or differences in sequence implementation. Pulseq is both an open file specification for MRI pulse sequences and an associated ecosystem of programming tools and vendor-specific interpreters (drivers) that overcome these barriers. Pulseq has seen significant growth within the pulse sequence developer community in the last 1-2 years, and interpreters for all major MRI vendors are, or will likely soon be, available. In this talk I will describe our role in the Pulseq project including our experience developing a Pulseq interpreter for one of the vendor platforms (GE), and our ongoing efforts to develop and evaluate a Pulseq functional MRI protocol that we hope will enable robust, truly harmonized multi-site and longitudinal functional studies. 

  Bio: Dr. Jon-Fredrik Nielsen is Research Associate Professor in the fMRI laboratory at University of Michigan, specializing in MRI sequence design and implementation. He created and manages the Pulseq interpreter for GE scanners, and is co-PI of the HarmonizedMRI project that seeks to implement and disseminate vendor-agnostic functional and quantitative neuroimaging protocols for more reproducible MRI research. 

Gary Durack
Principal Cytometrist and Engineering Fellow
Cytonome/ST

"Inventing your Future: A discussion of the personal costs and rewards of tech entrepreneurship after 40 years as a founder and inventor"

A-WIS Science Uncorked: A Public Seminar Series 

Tuesday, December 10th 6-7 pm 
“The Etiology of Inflammatory Responses: Exploring Biocultural Influences on Salivary C-Reactive Protein in a Nigerian Teaching Hospital”
Taiye Winful, PhD
Visiting Post Doctoral Research Associate, Anthropology, UIUC
The Literary
122 N Neil St. Champaign, IL 61820

Join Academic Women in STEAM (A-WIS) for our monthly seminar series, Science Uncorked. Our next event will be at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 10, at The Literary in downtown Champaign. 

Our speaker will be Taiye Winful, anthropology postdoctoral researcher, who will present “The Etiology of Inflammatory Responses: Exploring Biocultural Influences on Salivary C-Reactive Protein in a Nigerian Teaching Hospital." All are welcome!

Interested in presenting in the future? Let us know!
Feel free to forward this to anyone you think would be interested in attending. ALL are welcome to attend! 

Hello all,

The December Big Ten Neuroscience Seminar will be held on 16 December 2024 at 12 PM EST (11 AM CST). University of Wisconsin-Madison will be the host with presenters:

Introduction:  Elizabeth Quinlan, Ph.D., Professor & Chair

• Jared Cregg, PhD – Brainstem Circuits for Motor Control
• Lisandra Flores Aldama, PhD – RNA-RNA Interactions Promote Co-Translational Association of Heteromeric hERG 1a/1b Ion Chanels

 The seminar will be hosted on Zoom at this link https://psu.zoom.us/j/8078942764. Please see the attached flyer for more details on the presentation and speakers. We look forward to seeing you all there!

Best,

The Penn State Big 10 Neuroscience Planning Committee

Laurel Seemiller, Vinodh Kumar, Rachel Kang, and Sandy Austin

Scroll to the bottom https://grad.illinois.edu/registration-courses