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

Join Director Jeff Moore and your colleagues this summer 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 and Thursday throughout June, July, and August.

Contact name: Stephanie Pregent
Contact email: spregent@illinois.edu

The Neuroscience Program at Illinois is sponsoring the Neuroscience Program's Fall Orientation 2022 on August 18. Meeting will be held in room 5602 at 12:00pm. This meeting will be for new students and their faculty advisors.

Contact name: Elena Romanova
Contact email: romanova@illinois.edu

Join us at noon on Wednesdays this summer for restorative yoga with a view! All sessions are free and will be held in Beckman's fifth-floor tower room. Class will not be held on June 8 and July 27. All are welcome; bring your own mat! 

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

Title:

"Building and Navigating the Mentoring Relationship." 

Speaker: Alexis Thompson, Associate Dean for Student Success, Graduate College, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The mentoring relationship between the advisor and graduate student is a central part of graduate education. Alexis will discuss tools for developing a strong mentoring relationship and navigating issues if they arise. 

Contact name: Elena Romanova
Contact email: romanova@illinois.edu

Join us at noon on Wednesdays this summer for restorative yoga with a view! All sessions are free and will be held in Beckman's fifth-floor tower room. Class will not be held on June 8 and July 27. All are welcome; bring your own mat! 

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

Randy Ewoldt will speak at the Beckman Institute's virtual Director's Seminar at noon Thursday, Sept. 1. Ewoldt, professor and Kritzer Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, will be discussing "Squishy Materials Toolbox: Complex Fluids." 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: Neuroscience Program
Contact email: nsp@life.illinois.edu

Title: "Prenatal origins of neurodevelopmental dysfunction: viruses, microbes, microglia, and IL-17."

Speaker: Adrienne M. Antonson, Assistant Professor, Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Exposure to inflammation during critical developmental windows can disrupt neural circuitry formation and function, increasing the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Using maternal viral infection, Dr. Antonson's lab investigates how microbial, immune, and microglial signaling might underlie the etiologies of these disorders.

Contact name: Elena Romanova
Contact email: romanova@illinois.edu

Join us at noon on Wednesdays this summer for restorative yoga with a view! All sessions are free and will be held in Beckman's fifth-floor tower room. Class will not be held on June 8 and July 27. All are welcome; bring your own mat! 

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

James Hinman, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Illinois, will lecture on “Neural basis of cognitive maps in multiple reference frames” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom September 7, 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. Click for Zoom details.

Abstract: 

All animals navigate to goals, often to find food or safety. Given the evolutionary importance of goal directed navigation, it is not surprising that numerous brain circuits represent spatial information. The hippocampal formation maintains a world-centered, or allocentric, representation of the world and is utilized for plotting goal-directed routes. Cortico-striatal circuits represent spatial information in an egocentric reference frame, one centered on the agent.

An interesting computational problem arises as information must be transformed between allocentric and egocentric reference frames in order for you to act on that information, a transformation that your brain is constantly performing with great ease. I’ll discuss my work on the neural basis of spatial representations and several new directions that our research is moving.

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

Title: "Tuning landscapes of the primate ventral stream."

Speaker: Carlos R. Ponce, Assistant Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

To understand how the visual brain works in the natural world, we must study cortical neurons. Specifically, we must identify what kinds of information they store, and then relate this information to different types of images. Dr. Ponce will describe how his team uses machine learning to extract visual attributes represented by neurons and show that neurons may act as “similarity machines," signaling the distance between input signals and their encoded attributes. 

Contact name: Elena Romanova
Contact email: romanova@illinois.edu

Join us at noon on Wednesdays this summer for restorative yoga with a view! All sessions are free and will be held in Beckman's fifth-floor tower room. Class will not be held on June 8 and July 27. All are welcome; bring your own mat! 

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

Join us as we celebrate our fifth annual Miniature Brain Machinery Retreat with plenary lectures and presentations by our trainees — PhD students training in this cutting-edge field of brain science. We are excited to bring this retreat back to the face-to-face realm this year.

Where: 5602 Beckman Institute, Urbana, Illinois (Map)

When: September 15, 2022 from 8:30am to 4:00pm.

A Zoom option will be available upon request; please contact Anne McKinney for details.

Plenary Lectures

Tools for continuous health monitoring and closed-loop therapies

Lili Deligianni

Founder, sense4me Inc.

In vitro neurovascular models for health and disease

Roger Kamm

Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering, MIT

Bioengineering: Realizing the Promise of Cell Signaling Control in Health and Disease

Princess Imoukhuede

Hunter and Dorothy Simpson Endowed Chair of Bioengineering, University of Washington

Registration & Facebook

Your registration is free and will help us keep you informed of any updates or changes to retreat activities.

Register here>>

Facebook event page >> 

Contact name: Elena Romanova
Contact email: romanova@illinois.edu

Join us at noon on Wednesdays this summer for restorative yoga with a view! All sessions are free and will be held in Beckman's fifth-floor tower room. Class will not be held on June 8 and July 27. All are welcome; bring your own mat! 

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

Mei Shen, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Illinois, will lecture on “Nanoelectrochemistry for Probing Fast Chemical Transmitter Release with High Temporal Resolution” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom September 21, 2022.  Sara Bell, MBM trainee and PhD candidate in Chemistry, will give an introduction.

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

Bio:

Professor Shen received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin under the direction of Professor Allen J. Bard in 2011. Before joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mei performed postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Shigeru Amemiya at the University of Pittsburgh (2012), where she successfully imaged the ion flux across a single nanopore in an aqueous environment with nano-resolved Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy (SECM). Her current research interests interface between nanoscience, electrochemistry, and neuroscience, specifically involving the study of neurotransmission at nanobiological structures, such as single synaptic cleft.

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: 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: 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: 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.