John Carlis, Maggie Mahan and Apostolos Georgopoulos pose in the MEG chamber.

Maggie Mahan awarded NSF fellowship

BICB graduate student Margaret Mahan was recently awarded a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellowship providing three years of full support for her involvement in the Brain Sciences Center's Minnesota Women study under the direction of her adviser, Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos with guidance from Dr. John Carlis, CS&E. The title of her research proposal is "Neuroinformatics approach to determine brain status: a comprehensive assessment of brain, cognition, and language status from multimodal data."

Maggie's long-term goal is "to create a comprehensive and systematic database of key brain, cognitive, language and genomic measurements during the lifespan to characterize brain status, assess its change over time, and associate it with genomic makeup, cognitive function, and language abilities. The specific aim of this application is to develop means to handle efficiently and effectively this large database of diverse information and lay the groundwork for analyzing the data within and across modalities to comprehensively assess brain status."

 

MPR NEWS: Research shows brain scans can identify PTSD

by Lorna Benson, Minnesota Public Radio January 20, 2010 St. Paul, Minn.

A new high-powered scan can, for the first time, reveal post traumatic stress disorder in the brain. University of Minnesota neuroscience professor Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos, the study's leader, said the technique accurately identified more than 90 percent of PTSD cases in a recent study. "To my big surprise it just came out to be the best result ever," he said. "Somehow the sensitivity and accuracy of this test was phenomenal." Researchers at the university and the Minneapolis VA Medical Center said the device measures differences in the brain's magnetic fields. Georgopoulos said that detection rate is better than he has seen for many other diseases. Read the entire article at MPR NEWS...

 

MPR NEWS: The brain of a PTSD victim

with Kerri Miller, Tom Weber and Stephanie Curtis, The Daily Circuit,
March 26th, 2012

The recent killing of 16 Afghan civilians by an American soldier has once again brought the extreme effects of post-traumatic stress disorder to the public's attention. While we know that PTSD impacts its victims, we're just starting to understand its effects on the brain. The University of Minnesota's Brain Science Center is at the forefront of PTSD research. Brian Engdahl, a psychologist at the center, is a leading expert in the disorder. He'll join The Daily Circuit Monday to talk about the latest findings. Doctors are now able to see PTSD in brain scans, he said.

Listen to the interview with Brian Engdahl and Apostolos Georgopoulos.:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/03/26/daily-circuit-ptsd-brain