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

Congratulations to Dr. Alex Kolodkin, a primary member in the Neuroscience Department, for being awarded a Research to End Blindness Stein Innovation Award!

The Stein Award from the RPB provides unrestricted funding focused on visual system research in health and disease.  Dr. Kolodkin is one of 40 researchers who have received the award since it was established in 2014. Research in Dr. Kolodkin’s laboratory funded by this RBP award will be focused on investigating novel roles of mechcanotransduction channels in visual system development and in inherited diseases that compromise eye movement in response to image motion.

More information about RPB grants program can be found here:  www.rpbusa.org

Information about the RPB Stein Innovation Award can be found here: https://www.rpbusa.org/rpb/grants-and-research/grants/grants-for-individuals/stein-innovation-awards/

Congrats to Gian Molina-Castro, a Neuroscience PhD student in Dr. Dwight Bergles lab, for winning a 2021 Career Impact Award!  

Tune into the Career Impact Awards Ceremony on December 2, 2021 @ 1:00 p.m. (ET).  Register to attend on Zoom here!

Congratulations to our Neuroscience Grad students who passed their Graduate Oral Exams! 

Chris Seong Yeol An,
Riley Bannon,
Matilde Castro,
Daniel Daudelin,
Aleksander Geske,
Eric Hsu,
Hsin-Yi Hung,
Pelin Ozel,
Alina Spiegel,
Charles Walters,
Tiger Yu Kang Xu

The White Coat Ceremony on October 29th can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nG_3VNs4z0

Neuroscience students are coated at 56:15. 

Congratulations to Gian Molina-Castro, Graduate Student in Dwight Bergles' lab, who has been awarded a Diversity Leadership Award, one of 14 awarded across the University by the Diversity Leadership Council. 

Here is the link to the Hub article which also includes a link to register for the Awards Ceremony at 3 pm on Tuesday, September 28 (today).  

https://hub.jhu.edu/at-work/2021/09/24/dlc-awards/

By Varun Chokshi and Daniel O’Connor 

Originally published in FUNDAMENTALS AUGUST 2021

Congratulations to Dr. Angelika Doetzlhofer, a primary faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience, for being chosen as the winner of the 2021 Hamilton Smith Award for Innovative Research!  

Congratulations to the following graduate student and postdoctoral members of the Neuroscience Department for their Young Investigators’ Day awards!
https://hopkinsyidp.org

Congratulations to Dr. Daeyeol Lee, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and Psychological and Brain Sciences, for being selected as the 2021 recipient of the Samsung Ho-am Prize in Medicine!    

News story: http://www.hoamfoundation.org/eng/award/thisyear_view.asp?idx=442

Distinguished Professor Daeyeol Lee is an international authority in neuroscience. Professor Lee identified neural mechanisms of decision-making by incorporating economics into neuroscientific research using nonhuman primates as subjects. Widely considered the father of neuroeconomics, he integrated a range of academic disciplines that improve understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders and offer more possibilities for treatment.

Congratulations to Riley Bannon, a Neuroscience Graduate student in Dr. Peter Calabresi's lab, for being selected for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award!  

Dr. Gul Dolen's work on octopuses was highlighted in Scientific American. Check it out!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-octopus-could-be-the-next-model-organism/