Congratulations to Dr. Alex Kolodkin, Primary member in the Neuroscience Department, for being elected into the National Academy of Medicine today!

Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Alex Kolodkin, PhD, Charles J. Homcy and Simeon G. Margolis Professor, Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore. For his leadership in neural development research relating to the establishment of neuronal connectivity. He is known for his work on neuronal guidance cues and their receptors, the discovery of semaphorins, and unveiling guidance cue roles in neural circuit assembly and function in insects and mammals.

Full article: https://nam.edu/national-academy-of-medicine-elects-100-new-members-2020/

Deputy Director of Neuroscience Ph.D. Training Program

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

The Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience seeks applicants for the new position of Deputy Director of the Neuroscience Training Program (NTP). The NTP is one of the top neuroscience Ph.D programs in the world.  Based in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the program includes approximately 80 students and 73 faculty members from 14 departments across the broader university. The Deputy Director reports to the Program Director(s) and represents the Director(s) in many facets of the program. The Deputy Director has three areas of responsibilities: Leadership (50%), Academic (35%) , and Administrative (15%).

The lab of Dr. Seth Blackshaw Professor of Neuroscience in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience published a paper in Science that maps out the network of genes that controls the ability of retinal neurons to regenerate from glial support cells. 

The paper’s lead authors, Thanh Hoang and Jie Wang, comprehensively analyzed changes in gene action that occur in retinal glial cells following injury three species – zebrafish, chickens and mice – which differ in their ability to generate retinal neurons in response to injury.  Zebrafish can robustly regenerate neurons, newly hatched chicks can do so weakly and mice, like humans, cannot do so at all.  This study found that retinal glial cells from all three species transition to an activated stage following injury, and that this is required for glia to be able to generate neurons in zebrafish and chicks, but identified a gene regulatory network in mice that actively blocked this process.  By inactivating NFI family transcription factors, which are part of this network, Blackshaw’s group was able to induce mouse glia to generate retinal neurons.  This demonstrates that mammals possess a latent ability to regenerate neurons lost to injury and disease, and that this can be awakened by disrupting genes in this network.  This approach may be useful in cell-based therapies aimed at restoring retinal neurons lost due to blinding diseases.

Gene regulatory networks controlling vertebrate retinal regeneration 
Science  01 Oct 2020
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/30/science.abb8598