Rachel June Smith was selected as a 2020 American Epilepsy Society (AES) Fellow. Congrats to our new fellow!
Adam Li named ARCS scholar
Adam Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University with Dr. Sridevi Sarma. He obtained his undergraduate degree at University of California, San Diego (B.S’s in Bioengineering and Applied Mathematics). His research is in computational approaches to seizure onset zone localization in human epilepsy patients using intracranial EEG data applying control theory, computational modeling and machine learning.
Research by Pierre Sacré and Sri Sarma featured on the HUB.
Click here to read the article.
Rising Stars workshop puts the achievements of women researchers in the spotlight
Many scientists could advance their careers if they could just get the hang of storytelling. Impact statements that describe how their research improves peoples’ lives could help researchers secure funding, find collaborators, and share their findings with wider audiences.
“It’s not a matter of if your research will have an impact because it will,” said Harvard’s Deborah Burstein Mattingly, associate professor of radiology, health sciences, and technology. “We want you to focus on how and why your research will have an impact, and design it accordingly.”
Mattingly’s audience, a group of female scientists quickly rising in their fields, came together last month as part of the Rising Stars in Biomedical Engineering workshop held on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. Funded by several Hopkins institutes and departments and held at the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, the workshop aimed to give women the skills they need to pursue faculty positions in biomedical engineering.
While the number of women in labs and classrooms is growing, men still outnumber women when it comes to holding faculty positions in engineering disciplines. Johns Hopkins University and MIT are trying to change those statistics through programs such as the workshop, which was first held in 2016. It brings together a cohort of talented women graduate students and postdocs who represent the next generation of leadership in biomedical engineering research.
“Rising Stars began in 2012 at MIT with the mission of providing critical career development training for women in electrical engineering,” said Sri Sarma, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine. Sarma co-organized the workshop along with MIT professors Polina Golland and Martha Gray.
“We want these young rising stars to leave Hopkins empowered and excited to move onto the next phase of their careers,” she said.
New publication alert!
New exploratory method for exploring brain regions frequency features in neural data. Led by Ph.D. candidate, Macauley Breault. Click here to view.
Continuing to change the face of STEM: Sridevi Sarma receives second consecutive mentoring grant from L’Oreal
Sridevi Sarma, associate professor of biomedical engineering, associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine, and 2008 L’Oréal USA For Women In Science (FWIS) Fellow has been awarded a 2018 “Changing the Face of STEM” (CTFS) grant from L’Oreal to support her mentoring efforts.
Sarma is using her second CTFS grant to continue hosting a physics project with the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland. In spring 2018, Sarma and PhD candidate Macauley Breault developed and executed a fun and competitive STEM activity that brought together more than two dozen Girl Scout Cadette troops (ages 10-12) at Johns Hopkins University. The CTFS grant will allow Sarma to repeat this successful project in 2019.
The Girl Scout Roller Coaster Contest challenges participants’ engineering skills as they compete to build roller coasters out of household materials. Led by Sarma and a dozen female PhD candidates in her lab, each troop will learn about the physics of roller coasters, which will then help them to design a model for a chance to win tickets to Six Flags America.
Now in its third year, the CTFS program supports former L’Oréal USA For Women in Science fellows in their efforts to inspire the next generation of girls in STEM. Members of the L’Oréal USA FWIS alumni network were invited to apply for $2,500 grants to help fund new or existing mentoring projects in their communities. The awards will be administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), official partner of the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science program.
“We are committed to inspiring the next generation of women in STEM through our For Women in Science program,” said Lauren Paige, Vice President of Public Affairs & Strategic Initiatives at L’Oréal USA. “Our Changing the Face of STEM grant program builds on this long-time commitment and supports our fellows in their continuous work promoting STEM education in communities across the United States.”
A complete list of 2018 CTFS grant winners and their projects can be found here.
Kristin Gunnarsdottir receives American Epilepsy Society fellowship
Kristin Gunnarsdottir, a PhD student in the lab of ICM associate director and associate professor of biomedical engineering, Sridevi Sarma, has been awarded a fellowship from The American Epilepsy Society for the 2018-2019 academic year for her research titled, “A Novel Tool for Localizing the Epileptogenic Zone.”
Gunnarsdottir, who is pursuing her PhD in biomedical engineering, is developing a computational tool for seizure localization and treatment in patients with medically refractory epilepsy (MRE). The tool will create precise and accurate maps of the seizure onset region from invasive EEG recordings in MRE patients by (i) providing a more dense brain coverage with estimated invasive EEG recordings, and (ii) using network modeling to reveal the onset region in the form of heat maps. Ultimately, these maps will guide multiple laser ablations of specific brain areas.
Raina D’Aleo to attend MIT’s ‘Brains, Minds and Machines’ course
Raina D’Aleo, a neuroscience PhD student in the lab of Sridevi Sarma, associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine, has been accepted into the 2018 Brains, Minds and Machines advanced research training course hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Brains Minds and Machines.
The intensive three-week course held at at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, will give advanced students a “deep end” introduction to the problem of intelligence – how the brain produces intelligent behavior and how we may be able to replicate intelligence in machines.
The class discussions will cover a range of topics, complemented with workshops and tutorials to gain hands-on experience with these topics. The course aims to cross-educate computer engineers and neuroscientists, with the core presentations given jointly by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists and collaborative research projects performed in teams that combine students with diverse backgrounds.