Carnegie Mellon University

Neuroscience Institute Distinguished Speaker Series

The Neuroscience Institute is honored to host distinguished lecturers on research topics that include cognitive, systems, or computational neuroscience or neuro-tech and engineering.

Upcoming Speakers

March 28, 2024

Wilsaan Joiner

Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior; Neurology, University of California, Davis

Talk Title: Children with Unilateral Congenital Below Elbow Limb Deficiency (UCBED) Can Proportionally Control the Residual Muscles of the Missing Hand
Location: Mellon Institute 328 or Zoom

Abstract: Children with a unilateral congenital below elbow deficiency (UCBED) have one typically developed limb and one that ends below the elbow, at the proximal level or mid forearm. Given that their affected muscles have never actuated an intact hand, it has been assumed these patients have limited control of their residual muscles. Here, we examined the extent to which patients could use visual feedback of their muscle state to proportionally control their affected muscles. We used ultrasound imaging and machine learning to provide patients control over a cursor using either the affected or unaffected limb. As children transitioned between two selected muscle states/percent activation (e.g., an open hand: 0% activation, and full power grasp: 100% activation), the cursor moved along one axis. Following calibration, we asked participants to move the cursor to targets which appeared at intermediate activation levels (e.g., 50%). We show that without prior training, patients (N=8; ages 8-20) can accurately reach and maintain multiple target cursor positions with their affected muscles. Specifically, we observed that across participants there was a significant main effect of goal location on average cursor position for the affected limb (p < 0.01), revealing that patients can use visual feedback to proportionally control the state of their residual muscles. These results suggest that despite never actuating a hand with their affected muscles, children with UCBED can both control these muscles, and can use sensory information to modulate this control. These results contribute to the advancement of dexterous and intuitive prosthetic devices for this patient population.

Fall (TBD) 2024

Bianca Jones Marlin

Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cell Research, Department of Psychology, Department of Neuroscience

Talk Title: TBA
Location: TBD

Previous Speakers

January 18, 2024

Anne Churchland

Professor of Neurobiology, UCLA

Talk Title: Movements and engagement during decision-making

November 16, 2023

Jörn Diedrichsen

Western Research Chair for Motor Control and Computational Neuroscience Brain and Mind Institute, Department for Computer Science, Department for Statistical and Actuarial Sciences
University of Western Ontario

Talk Title: What is the function of the human cerebellum? Studying cortico-cerebellar loops across functional domains.

October 26, 2023

Jonathan Pillow

Professor of Neuroscience, Princeton University

Talk Title: New methods for understanding the dynamics of animal decision-making behavior
Location: Mellon Institute Social Room, 328 or Zoom

September 28, 2023

Jennifer Groh

Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Neurobiology, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering, Duke University. Lab Director of the SPACE Lab

Talk Title: Computing the Location(s) of Sounds in the Visual Scene
Location: Mellon Institute 328 & Zoom

May 25, 2023 

Stéphanie Lacour

Bertarelli Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology Laboratory of Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces (LSBI), EPFL

Location: Virtual - Zoom

4:00 p.m.

April 13, 2023

Li-Huei Tsai

Director, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT 
Picower Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Senior Associate Member, Broad Institute

Uncovering the Role of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Genes Using Stem Cells and Human Brains

March 2, 2023

Kia Nobre, FBA, MAE, fNASc

Chair, Translational Cognitive Neuroscience; Oxford
Director, Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity
Professional Fellow, St Catherine's College

Turning Attention Inside Out

March 24, 2022

Helen Mayberg, M.D.

Professor, Director, Center of Advanced Circuit Therapeutics;
Professor, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Neuroscience; Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Machine Learning Strategies to Track Brain and Behavioral State Changes During DBS Treatment for Depression

March 17, 2022

Kalanit Grill-Spector, Ph.D.

Professor; Department of Psychology
Chair, Department of Psychology
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Stanford University, CA

Human Visual Cortex as a Window into the Developing Brain.

March 3, 2022

Daniel Wolpert, FMedSci FRS

Professor of Neuroscience
Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute
Columbia University, New York

Contextual inference underlies the learning of sensorimotor repertoires.

January 27, 2022

Elizabeth A. Buffalo, Ph.D.

Professor and Chair Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine; Interim Associate Director for Research, Washington National Primate Research Center

Reconciling the Spatial and Mnemonic Views of the Hippocampus

May 6, 2021

Yael Niv

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton Neuroscience Institute

Latent causes, prediction errors, and the organization of memory

April 8, 2021

Carlos Brody

Wilbur H. Gantz III ’59 Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Neural sources of individual variability in cognitive behavior

April 1, 2021

Larry Abbott

William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience and Co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Columbia University
Principal Investigator, Columbia's Zuckerman Institute

Vector computations in the fly brain

March 11, 2021

Lena H. Ting

John and Jan Portman Professor of Biomedical Engineering
W.H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Division of Physical Therapy, Emory University
Co-Director, Georgia Tech and Emory Neural Engineering Centers

What does a muscle sense? Multiscale interactions governing muscle spindle sensory signals

December 3, 2020

Michael Yartsev

Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Engineering
Robertson Investigator, New York Stem Cell Foundation
Helen Wills Institute of Neuroscience Graduate Program
UC Berkeley Biophysics Graduate Program
UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering
University of California at Berkeley

Studying the Neural basis of Complex Spatial, Social and Acoustic Behaviors – in Freely Behaving and Flying Bats

May 7, 2020

Lucas Parra

Harold Shames Professor of Biomedical Engineering, City College of New York (CCNY) 

Mechanisms and Optimization of Transcranial Electric Stimulation

September 17, 2019

Edward Chang

Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco 

The Encoding of Speech Sounds in Human Temporal Lobe