Colin Franz, assistant professor at Northwestern University, shares his tips to end each day of SfN’s annual meeting with a feeling of accomplishment and make important career connections. What’s your key to a successful meeting? My advice for a first-time attendee would be, decide the one thing you want to accomplish for each half-day before you walk into the convention center.

“The best thing to do when you’re communicating your animal research is to be completely straightforward about it,” explains Chris Barncard, science writer at the University of Wisconsin. “People recognize genuine sentiment when they see it. So we tell our researchers, even if they’re apprehensive about talking about their animal research, to try to be as straight and complete as they can with people about how animal research is conducted. Those interactions often turn out very positive.” Watch this video to hear the: - Benefits of speaking openly about animal research. - Approaches that can help researchers talk about animal research. - Key tips and strategies that you can incorporate into your conversations.

Science shapes all of our lives and Paula Croxson frequently shares how with many distinct audiences. She is the New York producer of The Story Collider, which features true, personal stories about science through live performances and a podcast. Croxson is a group leader of NeuWrite, an online collaboration space for writers, artists, radio producers, filmmakers, and scientists. Additionally, she blogs for Psychology Today and has presented at comedy shows, festivals, and other events. For creativity in science communication, she won the Science Educator and Outreach Award in 2017. Here, she talks about her passion for storytelling and approaches to build narratives that resonate. Where did your passion for scientific storytelling originate? I told my first story for The Story Collider as part of a Brain Awareness Week show in 2012. It was about my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease. I initially thought I didn’t have anything worth sharing. I thought to myself, “Well, everyone knows someone with Alzheimer’s disease. There isn’t anything special about my story.” Even after I had worked on the story, weaving in my own work in memory research, I was convinced no one would care. During the performance, the lights were so bright I couldn’t see the audience’s reaction, so it wasn’t until I got down from the stage, shaking and feeling incredibly relieved, that I realized the impact of my words. With tears in their eyes, strangers asked to hug me and thanked me for sharing my experience. Suddenly, I got it.

Microglia — the macrophages of the central nervous system (CNS) — not only perform immune functions, but also sculpt the brain. They regulate neuronal development, play roles in plasticity and neurodegeneration, and prune synapses. Understanding how these cells function has helped researchers better understand how synapses can change during disease and may even lead to new therapies. Researchers now know that microglia differ from macrophages in other tissues, in that they perform specialized CNS-related functions. But within microglia, many different transcriptional profiles exist that depend upon sex, cellular age, development, brain location, and the resident bacteria of the gut and likely reflect each cell’s specialized function. Studies that provide a more in depth look a microglia profiles will help illuminate their plasticity and many functions.

In the last few decades, there has been an increasing push towards making science more participatory by engaging those who are part of or invested in the community that will be impacted by the research in the actual research process, from determining the questions that are worth asking, to contributing to experimental design, to communicating findings to the public.

The goal of any scientific presentation is to connect with your audience. What should you do before and during your talk to ensure that happens and you feel comfortable and enjoy the process? Following common guiding principles, such as knowing your audience and rehearsing ahead of time, will help you craft and deliver engaging messages. To help you design an impactful talk, SfN has created a toolkit on the three overarching elements of successful science presentations: structure/narrative, visual aids, and delivery.

From a panel of experts, get tips on how to identify the right grant mechanism for your career stage and who to contact for help, and understand how your application will be reviewed and how NIH Institutes finalize funding decisions. You will also hear helpful suggestions to maximize your chances for writing a successful application.

Human motor skill acquisition is improved by performance feedback and coupling such feedback with extrinsic reward (such as money) can enhance skill learning. However, the neurophysiology underlying such behavioral effect is unclear. To bridge this gap, we assessed the effects of reward on multiple forms of motor plasticity during skill learning. Sixty-five healthy participants divided in three groups performed a pinch-grip skill task with sensory feedback only, sensory and reinforcement feedback or both feedback coupled with an extrinsic monetary reward during skill training. To probe motor plasticity, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation at rest, on the left primary motor cortex before, at an early training time-point and after training in the three groups and measured Motor Evoked Potentials from task relevant muscle of the right arm. This allowed us to evaluate the amplitude and variability of corticospinal output, GABA-ergic short-intracortical inhibition and use-dependent plasticity before tr...

If you plan to pursue a graduate degree, consider the ways you can differentiate yourself, as suggested by neuroscience program faculty.

Material below summarizes the article, Phosphoinositol-4,5-bisphosphate Regulates Auditory Hair Cell Mechanotransduction Channel Pore Properties and Fast Adaptation, published on October 24, 2017, in JNeurosci and authored by Thomas Effertz, Lars Becker, Anthony W. Peng, and Anthony J. Ricci. In vertebrates, sound is detected by the organ of Corti, a sensory epithelium located inside the cochlea, the snail shell shaped part of our inner ear. The organ of Corti comprises one row of inner hair cells (IHC), which function as microphones, and three rows of outer hair cells (OHC), which function as amplifiers of faint sound stimuli. Both IHCs and OHCs possess a sensory organelle, termed hair bundle, on their apical surface that consists of multiple rows of actin-filled stereocilia. The stereocilia are arranged in a staircase pattern, with each shorter stereocilium connected to its taller neighbor at the tips through filaments, termed tip links. Sound stimulation ultimately leads to fluid motions inside of the cochlea that result in hair bundle deflection. Deflections towards the tallest stereocilia row cause tip links to pull at the tips of each shorter stereocilium. Those pulls directly open mechano-electrical transduction (MET) channels, which allow inflow of cations and thus the translation of mechanical stimuli into electro-/chemical cell signals.