In this webinar, get advice from faculty members at a variety of career stages on how to give and assess academic chalk talks, which require you to summarize your short-term specific aims, long-term research plans, and funding sources, as well as demonstrate your speaking and teaching abilities.

Recent findings have shifted the view of cholecystokinin (CCK) from being a cellular neuronal marker to being recognized as a crucial neuropeptide pivotal in synaptic plasticity and memory processes. Despite its now appreciated importance in various brain regions and abundance in the basal ganglia, its role in the striatum, which is vital for motor control, remains unclear. This study sought to fill this gap by performing a comprehensive investigation of the role of CCK in modulating striatal medium spiny neurons (MSN) membrane properties, as well as the secondary somatosensory cortex S2 to MSN synaptic transmission and plasticity in rodents. Using in-vivo optopatch-clamp recording in mice on identified medium spiny neurons (MSNs), we showed that the application of CCK receptor type 2 (CCK2R) antagonists decreases corticostriatal transmission in both direct and indirect pathway MSNs. Moving to an ex vivo rat preparation to maximize experimental access, we showed that CCK2R inhibition impacts MSN membrane p...

The striatum is the primary input nucleus of the basal ganglia, integrating a dense plexus of inputs from the cerebral cortex and thalamus to regulate action selection and learning. Neuroanatomical mapping of the striatum and its sub compartments has been carried out extensively in rats and mice, non-human primates, and cats allowing comparative neuroanatomy studies to derive heuristics about striatal composition and function. Here, we systematically map corticostriatal topography from motor, somatosensory, auditory, and visual cortices as well as thalamostriatal parafascicular (PfN) inputs in the Mongolian Gerbil. We also map a pathway reported in mice from medial vestibular nucleus to the PfN that could convey vestibular information to the striatum. Our findings align with those of similar studies in other rodents, indicating homologous neuroanatomical connectivity patterns within the corticostriatal projectome across rodentia. We observed corticostriatal peaks of dense labeling for each input with a dif...

In A Look at One Neuroscientist’s Career in Pharma and Biotech, Khan Ozol, a neuroscientist and global head of talent scouting at Novartis, shared his career journey and how he got to where he is today. Here, in part two of this interview, Ozol describes the types of positions available to neuroscientists in industry and shares advice on how to be competitive candidates for them. Broadly speaking, what are different types of bench positions available in industry? There are many career opportunities for neuroscientists in industry — it just depends on where you’re at and what that company is focused on. Master’s students can work at the bench as research and senior research associates with different neuroscience specializations in many pharmaceutical and biotech companies in Europe and the United States.

Charlotte Boettiger, who is actively involved in SfN’s North Carolina Triangle Chapter and serves on SfN’s Government and Public Affairs committee, shares why engaging policymakers at the local level is an important and powerful way to make the case for federal funding to support science research. Specifically, she highlights how to educate your local representatives about the importance of funding basic science research and ways to engage policymakers through your SfN chapter. Overall, why is it valuable to engage your policymakers to support biomedical research? Policymakers, in large part, are not scientists. So, it's our obligation, particularly if we are publicly funded scientists, to educate them about the funding that they provide, what that funding enables, and why their support is essential.

What goes into a successful chalk talk? Qiaojie Xiong, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, answers based on her own experience going through the process. In this video, she delivers a snapshot of her research plan to give you an idea of the structure, pacing, and tone. Additionally, below the video, she answers common questions, such as how to structure your talk and ways to get feedback. For more insights from faculty on how to prepare for and deliver an effective chalk talk, register for the upcoming webinar, Demystifying the Academic Chalk Talk. What is the purpose of a chalk talk? Chalk talks show your ability to teach. This is especially important for public institutions where teaching undergrads is a big component.

Facial paralysis is characterized by an injury to the facial nerve, causing the loss of the functions of the structures that it innervates, as well as changes in the motor cortex. Current models have some limitations for the study of facial paralysis, such as movement restriction, the absence of studying awake animals in behavioral contexts, and the lack of a model that fully evaluates facial movements. The development of an algorithm capable of automatically inferring facial paralysis and overcoming the existing limitations is proposed in this work. In C57/BL6J mice, we produced both irreversible and reversible facial paralysis. Video recordings were made of the faces of paralyzed mice to develop the algorithm for detecting facial paralysis applied to mice, which allows us to predict the presence of reversible and irreversible facial paralysis automatically. At the same time, the algorithm was used to track facial movement during gustatory stimulation, and extracellular electrophysiological recordings in ...

In this Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture, Siddhartha Mukherjee engages in a conversation with Eric Nestler, past president of SfN, about the excitement and importance of communicating the promise of scientific inquiry to the public.

Machine learning refers to software that can learn from experience and is thus particularly good at extracting knowledge from data and for generating predictions. Recently, one powerful variant, deep learning, has become the staple of recent progress and hype in applied machine learning. Deep learning uses biologically inspired artificial neural networks with many processing stages. These deep networks, together with the ever-growing computing power and larger datasets for learning, now deliver groundbreaking performances.

The topics of scientific rigor and data reproducibility have been increasingly covered in the scientific and mainstream media, and are being addressed by publishers, professional organizations, and funding agencies, including NIH. This webinar — the first in a series titled Promoting Awareness and Knowledge to Enhance Scientific Rigor in Neuroscience— will address topics of scientific rigor as they pertain to pre-clinical neuroscience research.