Congratulations to Dr. Hyungbae Kwon and colleagues whose latest results were recently published in Nature Neuroscience!  

Dr. Seth Blackshaw's group also contributed to this work.

Link to Nature Neuroscience publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01770-9

This study provides the cellular and circuit level demonstration of behavioral causality in a neuronal ensemble that encodes a goal location during spatial navigation. Understanding neural underpinnings of ‘where-to-go’ decision has been a long-standing challenge in neuroscience, but little is known about a cognitive unit of “goal location” and no study has directly demonstrated a causal role of such cognitive unit in guiding spatial navigation, suggesting current understanding in spatial navigation remains incomplete.

The Kwon lab delineated neuronal mechanisms of goal-memory and memory-guided spatial navigation in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). The Kwon lab showed how dopamine release in the NAc during positive experience at the goal location rapidly forms a goal memory that is reliably manifested to guide spatial navigation upon needs. The study described how a specific spatiotemporal pattern of dopamine signals shapes NAc neuronal population to encode a spatial goal, and the first time goal-directed navigation is fully reconstituted solely by artificially assembling the goal-memory and motivated behavior together. Results report that NAc memory ensemble can control spatial navigation, suggesting a “modular framework of cognition” in memory-guided behaviors.

Figure caption: 

A light-sheet microscope 3D image displays the convergence of dopaminergic transmitter inputs from the ventral tegmental area (green), a midbrain structure associated with reward and motivation, and glutamatergic inputs from the ventral hippocampus (red), an area deep within the brain that helps with navigation, onto the nucleus accumbens. Credit: Kanghoon Jung

Congratulations to Dr. Richard Huganir and colleagues whose latest results on AMPA receptors were just published in Nature!

The following Department of Neuroscience labs also contributed to this work:  Xinzhong Dong, Seth Blackshaw, Dwight E. Bergles, Solange P. Brown

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08027-2

The Huganir lab discovered that the presence of calcium-permeable AMPA receptors (CP-AMPARs) contributes to the low feature selectivity of parvalbumin-positive (PV) interneurons across different brain regions and species. The Huganir group found that PV interneurons have a low expression of the GluA2 subunit, leading to an abundance of CP-AMPARs. This low expression is conserved across various species, from ferrets to humans. When CP-AMPARs were replaced with calcium-impermeable AMPARs in PV interneurons, their orientation selectivity in the visual cortex and spatial selectivity in the hippocampus increased. The study also found that inducing CP-AMPAR expression in excitatory neurons, which usually have low CP-AMPAR levels, decreased their orientation selectivity. These findings suggest that CP-AMPARs play a crucial role in maintaining the low selectivity of PV interneurons and that this mechanism is conserved across different species and brain regions.

The OneNeuro iniative at JHU, led by Dr. Richard Huganir and Dr. Patricia Janak, aims to create a collaborative interactive network of researchers and practicioners investigating Neuroscience at JHU.  Read more about OneNeuro is this week's Hub:

https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/09/23/oneneuro-brain-mind-science/

"Our goal is to stop at nothing short of a complete understanding of the brain, from the molecular level to the cognitive and behavioral levels,"  - Dr. Richard Huganir

"We're building a unique community at Hopkins that is unified across all scales of neuroscience research, from the most granular level, molecules, up to how it all comes together to support the mind." - Dr. Patricia Janak

Dr. David Linden, primary member of the Neuroscience Department, contributes an article to the magazine Aeon about touch.  In this entertaining and informative article, he discusses why certain parts of the body are more pleasurable to the touch than others. 

Sexual sensation, What makes touch on some parts of the body erotic but not others? Cutting-edge biologists are arriving at new answers, by David Linden
https://aeon.co/essays/what-explains-the-variations-in-sexual-sensation-between-us

A new study in Nature Neuroscience by Dr. Jim Knierim and Dr. Noah Cowan investigate navigation without landmarks.  Dr. Knierim is a Primary Neuroscience faculty member at the Mind Brain Institute and Dr. Cowan is a facullty member in Mechanical Engineering. 

Read the full story in Hub here:  https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/06/27/brains-navigate-without-landmarks/

Article in Nature Neuroscience: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01681-9.epdf

Congratulations to Dr. Patricia Janak, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and PBS, who was named a AAAS Fellow!  Also named as AAAS Fellows are Dr. Akira Sawa and Dr. Rejji Kuruvilla, who hold secondary faculty appointments in the Neuroscience Department.   Congrats!!!!

Dr. Huganir's latest research on SynGAP appears in the latest issue of Science! This vital synaptic protein has an additional surpising role as a scaffold to regulate PSD-95 availability.  Check it out!

Congratulations to Dr. Karina Chaudhari for winning the 2023 DuBose Postdoctoral Research Scholar Award!  Dr. Chaudhari is a Postdoc in Dr. Alex Kolodkin's lab studying direction selective visual circuits.  

Dr. David Linden talks with Dr. Andrew Huberman about everything from sensory touch, to sleep paralysis, to death and religion.  Check out the full interview now on Youtube:  https://youtu.be/29n0WG317tM 

Source: https://hubermanlab.com/dr-david-linden-life-death-and-the-neuroscience-of-your-unique-experience/

Congratulations to Dr. Leah Elias for being awarded a 2023 Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship!  Dr. Elias is a Postdoc in Dr. Seth Blackshaw's lab in the Department of Neuroscience.  

Excerpt from Jane Coffin Childs Press Release:

The Jane Coffin Childs Fund for Medical Research Names its 2023 Fellows

Twenty-seven exceptional postdoctoral fellows selected as awardees to esteemed fellowship program in biomedical research.

Fellows are funded for a three-year term and receive flexible stipend support.

“The Jane Coffin Childs Fund welcomes the 2023 cohort of Fellows to our distinguished network of scientists around the world and are proud to be able to advance the careers of these exceptional individuals.”  said Anita Pepper, Ph.D., the JCC’s executive director.

Congratulations to Dr. Amy Bastian, primary member of the Neuroscience Department and Chief Science Officer at the Kennedy Kreiger Institute, for her election to the National Academy of Sciences!  

Check out Dr. Linden's recent guest essay opinion piece in the New York Times.  He discusses neuroscience, cancer, and the potential healing powers of the mind.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/opinion/cancer-brain-mind-body.html

Congratulations to Dr. Xinzhong Dong, primary faculty member in the Neuroscience Department, for his election into the 2022 class of fellows in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  

The 2022 class of fellows will receive a certificate and a gold and blue rosette pin (representing science and engineering, respectively) to commemorate their election and will be celebrated in Washington, D.C., in summer 2023. They will also be featured in the AAAS News & Notes section of Science in February 2023.

Solomon Snyder, distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine officially retired after more than 55 years of service to the Johns Hopkins community. 

Thank you Sol for your vision and commitment to starting and building the Department of Neuroscience! 

Congratulations to Dr. Richard Huganir, Professor and Director of the Neuroscience Department, for being awarded the Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience in 2022. He was honored with this award at the Society for Neuroscience meeting November 14th, 2022. 

Congratulations to Dr. Alex Kolodkin, Professor of Neuroscience, for being elected to the National Academy of Sciences!

Link to the announcement. 

Dr. Solange Brown, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, has been selected as the recipient of the 2022 Hamilton Smith Award for Innovative Research in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Science (IBBS) at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. 

The Hamilton Smith award recognizes and advances innovative research by early career faculty members in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences by providing them with funding to pursue their most creative ideas.

The 2022 Hamilton Smith Award for Innovative Research 
is being presented to:
Dr. Solange Brown
Associate Professor Department of Neuroscience 

Dr. Brown’s research focuses on the development and function of neural circuits and the behaviors that they control in the mammalian brain.  Dr. Brown and her students have defined the cellular and circuit organization of layer 6 of the cerebral cortex, showing how inhibitory interneurons integrate thalamic and local synaptic inputs.   More recently, the Brown laboratory has shown, by recording neural activity and by chemogenetic silencing in awake and behaving mice, that the claustrum, a subcortical nucleus with extensive connections to the neocortex, plays an important role in selecting appropriate motor actions.

Congratulations to Thomas Burnett (graduate student in the O'Connor/Nielsen lab) and Gian Molina-Castro (graduate student in the Bergles lab) for being inducted into the Johns Hopkins University 2022 class of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society!  Only 5 graduate students from all of Johns Hopkins were chosen for this prestigious honor! 

Thomas and Gian will be officially inducted at the national ceremony at the National Bouchet Honor Society Induction Ceremony and Conference hosted by Yale University (this year virtually), on April 7-8, 2022.

Johns Hopkins will have an induction ceremony with the JHU President and Provost on May 17th 2022. 

Dr. David Linden, primary member of the Neuroscience Department, writes candidly in The Atlantic about his cancer diagnosis, and how this altered his perspective of the mind. The article is written with Dr. Linden's typical humor and insights about life and neuroscience. 

As Dr. Linden himself says "It’s not actually quite as much of a big, bad bummer as the title would suggest.  Please do give it a look."

Link to the article in The Atlantic:  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/terminal-cancer-neuroscientist-prepares-death/621114/

 Also hear Dr. Linden on the January 17th episode of Here & Now on NPR. 
 Dr. Linden's segment starts at 10:54: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1073614138/1073646872