January 2023

Julian Quintanilla’s (graduate student – Lynch Lab) submission was selected as Cover Art for the 2022 CNLM Annual report. The artwork depicts the desk of the father of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Having seen the disorderly state of many scientists’ desks, this art tries to capture the similar elegant chaos that may have plagued Ramón y Cajal as he created the beautiful artwork that led to much of our current understanding of the brain.

Alexa Tierno (Hunt Lab) gave a talk for the Investigators Workshop on Advanced Gene and Cell Based Therapies to Target General Mechanisms of Epilepsy at the American Epilepsy Society meeting in December.

Munjal Acharya, PhD was invited to give a talk on “Neuroprotective strategies to prevent radiotherapy-induced cognitive decline” as part of the Visiting Professor Series at the Brain Tumor Center within the Siteman Cancer Center at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in April 2023.

Lulu Chen, PhD and co-investigator Masashi Kitazawa, PhD (UCI Public Health) were awarded a five-year, multi-center grant to treat common early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. News Release.

Robert Hunt, PhD gave a talk for the Investigators Workshop on Diverse Roles of Interneuron Subtypes in Acquired Epilepsies at the American Epilepsy Society meeting in December.

Kei Igarashi, PhD received the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. This is a mid-career prize awarded to 25 researchers each year in Japan.

David Reinkensmeyer, PhD was keynote speaker on “Robots and Sensors for Neurologic Rehabilitation: What Have We Learned and What Comes Next?” at the 37^th Congress of the French Society for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation on December 1 in Rennes, France, attended by about 1,500 people.

Xiangmin Xu, PhD, director of the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM), has announced that the 2023 Neural Circuit Conference will be held in the summer from August 21-23, 2023, co-sponsored by the Cajal Club, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and UCI CNCM.

CNCM and Xu Lab led a study showing that cognitively impaired degus are a natural animal model well suited for Alzheimer’s research. The study shows degus exhibit neuropathological features that resemble human Alzheimer’s Disease. SOM News Release. This was also featured in Fortune magazine article “The next breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research could come from old and ‘cognitively impaired’ Chilean rats”, as well as Futurity and News-Medical.Net.

Additionally, CNCM members were recognized in Irvine Standard’s “10 leaders at the center of Irvine’s health care.”