Su-Chun Zhang, MD, PhD, the Steenbock Professor in Behavioral and Neural Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Waisman Center investigator, is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers selected by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative to receive $9 million over three years for the “Parkinson5D: Deconstructing Proximal Disease Mechanisms Across Cells, Space and Progression” or PD5D project.
UCEDD – Slide of the Week
Title: Pre- to post-training change in childcare provider belief that developmental monitoring is important and ability to identify appropriate referrals to make when there is a developmental concern Legend: Training in developmental monitoring significantly increases …
Andrew Alexander, PhD – Slide of the Week
Demonstration of the ability of MPnRAGE to correct for severe motion artifacts in a 7 year old girl. Retrospective motion correction greatly reduced motion-induced blurring in both structural T1-weighted images and quantitative T1 maps. The correction greatly improves the reliability of brain imaging measurements in children. The plots indicate the estimated amount of head motions that were corrected.
Waisman Biomanufacturing partners with GigaGen to manufacture new COVID-19 drug
Waisman Biomanufacturing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison will begin manufacturing a new drug to treat and prevent COVID-19, developed by California-based biotech company GigaGen. The drug, called GIGA-2050, uses a new approach similar to treating COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma, or blood products from people recovering (convalescing) from an infection. Waisman Biomanufacturing was created to facilitate just this sort of development and testing of new types of drugs.
Inside Waisman: Meet Lindsay McCary
As a third year graduate student in school psychology at the University of South Carolina, Lindsay McCary, PhD, was looking for a new advisor to help her with her dissertation.
Friends present staff, students and family awards
The Friends of the Waisman hosts this annual event for members of the Friends organization; community supporters of the Waisman Center; and Waisman Center faculty, staff, and students. The 2020 Awards were presented at a virtual meeting on August 18 2020.
Donna Werling, PhD – Slide of the Week
Gene expression levels vary across developmental stage, cell type, and region in the brain. Genomic variants also contribute to the variation in expression, and some neuropsychiatric disorder loci may exert their effects through this mechanism. To investigate these relationships, we present BrainVar, a unique resource of paired whole-genome and bulk tissue RNA sequencing from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of 176 individuals across prenatal and post- natal development.
Xinyu Zhao, PhD – Slide of the Week
Title: Identification of FMR1-regulated molecular networks in human neurodevelopment Legend: Generation of FMR1-FLAG hPSCs using one-step seamless genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9, Neural differentiation of hPSCs into forebrain dorsal NPCs (dNPC) and ventral MGE-like NPCs (vNPC), …
Daifeng Wang, PhD – Slide of the Week
The molecular mechanisms and functions in complex biological systems currently remain elusive. Recent high-throughput techniques, such as next-generation sequencing, have generated a wide variety of multiomics datasets that enable the identification of biological functions and mechanisms via multiple facets. However, integrating these large-scale multiomics data and discovering functional insights are, nevertheless, challenging tasks.
Houri K. Vorperian, PhD – Slide of the Week
We present a unified heat kernel smoothing framework for modeling 3D anatomical surface data extracted from medical images. Due to image acquisition and preprocessing noises, it is expected the medical imaging data is noisy. The surface data of the anatomical structures is regressed using the weighted linear combination of Laplace-Beltrami (LB) eigenfunctions to smooth out noisy data and perform statistical analysis.