News from the Center

A new look!

 In 2004, the Brain Sciences Center unveiled a new website designed to help raise public awareness of brain research. Today, our site has a new look! We hope you find it visually-pleasing and user-friendly. For the time being, you may still visit our old site at: http://www.brain.umn.edu/index_old.htm

2009 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award

Brain Sciences graduate students Aurelio Alonso and Vasileios Christopoulos were awarded the 2009 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award on Wednesday, September 11th during the 15th Annual American Legion and University of Minnesota Lecture in Brain Sciences. The lecture, "Circuits & circuit disorders of the basal ganglia: surgical repair", was was given by Mahlon DeLong, M.D., W.P. Timmie Professor of Neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. Photo (above) l-r: Jim Kellogg, president of the Brain Science Foundation; Lloyd Schaeffer and Bill Peters, Sons of the American Legion; and Dan Ludwig, past-National Commander, American Legion, award recipient Vasileios Christopoulos.

     Aurelio Alonso's PhD thesis project involves brain imaging and temporo-mandibular disorder. He uses magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the brain activity level during non-painful tactile stimuli that are applied to the faces of normal and arthomayalgic subjects. Aurelio's future goal is to pursue an academic career and to study the differents types of orofacial pain conditions.

Vasileios Christopoulos' PhD thesis topic is "Characteristics information required for human motor control". He is interested in using MEG to study the way the brain represents information and uncertainty in motor control tasks. After graduation, Vasileios plans to continue his research and looks forward to teaching sudents about the 'secrets of brain science'.

Conferences

BSC Researcher Roger Dumas recently returned from the 2009 Society for Music Perception & Cognition meeting in Indianapolis, where he presented a poster entitled "Neural processing of pitch as revealed by MEG". Along with fellow investigators Scott Lipscomb (School of Music, UofM), Art Leuthold and Apostolos Georgopoulos, Roger discovered subnetworks in the human brain that process musical pitches when they are presented randomly. The team is now investigating how these networks encode pitches in melodic sequences.