News & Announcements

Past news and announcements are shown below. Current news is shown on our homepage.

Deater-Deckard and Team Study Adolescent Risky Decisions

 Kirby Deater-Deckard

Developmental psychologist Kirby Deater-Deckard, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Neurosciecne and Behavior Graduate Program, is a co-investigator on a recently renewed five-year, $3.7 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse to support a research team studying the environmental and neurobiological risk factors that influence brain development and healthy versus unhealthy decision-making in adolescence and early adulthood. Read more

Katz, Lyzinski to Explore Neuron-Level Mechanisms of How Brains Make Decisions

photo of Paul Katz

Paul Katz, professor of biology and director of neuroscience, and Vincent Lyzinski, a network expert and assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, recently received a three-year, $3.5 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for a new collaboration between researchers at four universities who will explore the neuron-level mechanisms of how the brain makes decisions.

The project is part of President Obama’s 2013 Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative at NIH, which seeks to accelerate the development and application of new technologies leading to “a revolutionary new dynamic picture of the brain that, for the first time, shows how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space.” Read more

UMass Amherst researchers studied origins of adverse effects of a common anti-cancer treatment

Results of a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggest that a new treatment approach is needed – and how this may be possible – to address adverse effects of aromatase inhibitors, drugs commonly prescribed to both men and women to prevent recurrence of estrogen-positive breast cancer.

Neuroscientists Agnès Lacreuse, Luke Remage-Healey and their graduate students at UMass Amherst, collaborator Jessica Mong at the University of Maryland and first author Nicole Gervais worked together on this research. Gervais, who conducted the experiments as a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amherst, is now at the University of Toronto. The authors studied a small group of aged male and female marmosets, non-human primates whose brains are much like humans’ and which exhibit “complex behavior,” senior author Lacreuse explains. (Read more)

Research by Rebecca Spencer is Highlighted by Education Drive News

Professor Rebecca Spencer

Research conducted by Professor Rebecca Spencer, Psychological and Brain Sciences, that indicates missing a nap for small children significantly and negatively reduced memory in several areas, including motor-skill development and regulating emotions, is cited in a news story. The story says even if children in preschool and kindergarten don’t require a nap, they should at least have some quiet time during the day. It also says up to 60 percent of 4-year-olds still need naps. Read More

Four new assistant professors join the Neuroscience and Behavior Graduate Program

The Neuroscience and Behavior Graduate Program welcomes four new Assistant Professors. They epitomize the diversity of backgrounds and approaches in the Neurosciences. Two of the faculty members are in Biology, one in Psychological Brain Sciences, and one in Communication Disorders. Each of them is recruiting PhD students for the coming year.  Read More.

UMass Week of Memory and Forgetting Begins Oct. 29

Week of Memory and Forgetting 2018

UMass Week of Memory and Forgetting: Science, Society, and Senescence” brings together science and art to explore and understand memory from a variety of perspectives through a variety of events from Oct. 29-Nov. 2.  Read more

Bittman receives $2.4 million, 4-year NIH grant to support circadian rhythm research

The 4-year, $2.4 million NIH grant will allow Bittman to determine the sequence of duper, a mutation that speeds up the circadian clock and dramatically reduces jet lag by affecting the function of a master pacemaker in the hypothalamus. Millions of Americans work shift schedules, and most of us have experienced the disorientation that occurs when we travel across multiple time zones. Such abrupt shifts of the biological clock aggravate many diseases. The new grant will allow the Bittman lab  to determine how the duper mutation alters the brain's clock. In addition, Bittman will use the duper mutant to determine whether phase shifts per se, or the internal desynchronization of multiple clocks throughout the body, are responsible for the adverse health effects of jet lag. The work is done in collaboration with John Hogenesch (Cincinnati Children's Hospital).

Rat Brain Study By Richardson, Li and Colleagues Links Signal Velocity to Myelination

One of the outstanding questions in neurodevelopment research has been identifying how connections in the brain change to improve neural function during childhood and adolescence. Now, results from a study in rats just reported by neuroscientists Heather Richardson of psychological and brain sciences, Geng-Lin Li of biology, and colleagues suggest that as animals transition into adolescence, specific physical changes to axons speed up neural transmission, which may lead to higher cognitive abilities. (Read more)

Neuroscientist Rebecca Spencer on the Role of Sleep in Emotional Health

http://cognaclab.com/wp/

Rebecca Spencer of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department  is investigating how Slow-wave sleep (SWS) may contribute to emotional memory processing in children, as was recently highlighted in an article in the BBC. Read more

 

Lacreuse lab receives $361,752 in NIH supplemental funding for Alzheimer’s disease study

The Lacreuse lab received $361,752 in supplemental funding from NIH to study whether Alzheimer’s disease-like symptoms occur naturally in  nonhuman primates with aging. Lacreuse is especially interested in determining whether female marmosets, like women, are more prone to such symptoms,  and her work seeks to identify the factors that predict pathological aging in each sex.  Lacreuse believes that comparative studies in different primate species will provide important new clues to advance our understanding of the etiology of Alzheimer's disease in humans.

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