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Sabato Santaniello receives 2 year $150k award from National Science Foundation

Sabato Santaniello, a scientist in the lab of Dr. Sridevi Sarma, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computational Medicine, recently received an award of $150K for 2 years from the National Science Foundation. The award, which is part of the NSF’s “Energy, Power, and Adaptive Systems” program is entitled “EAGER: Modeling Network Dynamics in the Epileptic Brain to Develop Translational Tools for Seizure Localization and Detection”. The study is a collaboration with the Epilepsy Center at JHMI.

From the Grant abstract:

“Epilepsy affects 60 million people worldwide who suffer from recurrent seizures, and 40% of patients do not respond to any drug therapy. These patients would greatly benefit from closed-loop neurostimulation therapy to suppress seizures, but the efficacy of such therapy critically depends on whether the stimulus is administered close to the seizure origin (epileptogenic zone, EZ) and immediately prior to or at seizure onset. This program develops novel computational tools for effective EZ localization and seizure onset detection from multi-channel intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings.”

More details can be found about the award on the NSF website here.

Congratulations Sabato!

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Dr. Sridevi Sarma speaks at SIAM DS13 symposium

Dr. Sridevi Sarma, presented at the 2013 SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Conference on Applied Dynamical Systems. The conference was held at the Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, Snowbird, Utah, USA, from May 19-23. Dr. Sarma’s presentation was entitled “On the Therapeutic Mechanisms of Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson’s Disease: Annihilation or Restoration?”

From SIAM’s site: “The application of dynamical systems theory to areas outside of mathematics continues to be a vibrant, exciting and fruitful endeavor. These application areas are diverse and multidisciplinary, ranging over all areas of applied science and engineering, including biology, chemistry, physics, finance, and industrial applied mathematics. This conference strives to achieve a blend of application-oriented material and the mathematics that informs and supports it. The goals of the meeting are a cross-fertilization of ideas from different application areas, and increased communication between the mathematicians who develop dynamical systems techniques and applied scientists who use them.”

To view a video of the presentation, click here.

To view pdf slides, click here.

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Dr. Sridevi Sarma named recipient of a 2012 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

Assistant Professor Sridevi Sarma of The Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Computational Medicine, is the recipient of a 2012 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE is the highest honor the federal government gives to its young scientists and is intended to recognize some of the finest scientists and engineers who, while early in their research careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the twenty-first century. This year, 96 PECASE awards were granted. Sri will receive her award at a ceremony at the White House later this year.

This is not the first award for Sri. She joined the Institute for Computational Medicine as a 2008 recipient of a prestigious Burroughs Welcome Fund Careers at the Scientific Interface award. She has been awarded research grants by both NIH and NSF, and is also a 2011 recipient of an NSF Career award. These awards all recognize her innovative work at the interface of systems/control theory and neuroscience, particularly the area of improving methods for treating neurological disorders using deep brain stimulation.

To read the full JHU Whiting School of Engineering release, click here.

Let us all congratulate Sri on these outstanding achievements.

Categories Media News

Sri Sarma featured in JHU Gazette story: New early warning system for seizures

Assistant Professor Sridevi Sarma of the Institute for Computational Medicine has been featured in the JHU Gazette for work recently published in Epilepsy & Behavior. The research centers on the creation of a novel framework for seizure onset detection which could be used in the future with brain implants that send electrical impulses to stop Epileptic seizures just as they begin to occur.

“These devices use algorithms—a series of mathematical steps—to figure out when to administer the treatment,” Sarma said. “They’re very good at detecting when a seizure is about to happen, but they also produce lots of false positives, sometimes hundreds in one day. If you introduce electric current to the brain too often, we don’t know what the health impacts might be. Also, too many false alarms can shorten the life of the battery that powers the device, which must be replaced surgically.”

See the full story and see a video detailing the research in Dr. Sarma’s lab on the JHU Gazette website.

The story has also been featured in JHU News Releases.

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Kevin Kahn awarded a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Travel Award

Kevin Kahn, a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Sridevi Sarma, has recently been awarded a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Collaborative Research Travel Grant. Kevin will be traveling to Cleveland Clinic with the assistance of the grant to help design and run experiments to highlight how motor related cortical areas work to make the body perform high velocity movements under loaded dynamic environments. The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is an independent private institution dedicated to advancing biomedical sciences and uses this travel grant as a means of promoting collaborations across fields and institutions.

Congratulations on your award Kevin!

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Matthew Kerr awarded a JHU ARCS Foundation Scholarship for $15,000

Matthew Kerr, a Graduate Student in the lab of Dr. Sridevi Sarma, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computational Medicine, has been awarded the Johns Hopkins University’s 2012-2013 ARCS Foundation Scholarship. The graduate award of $15,000 may be used for education-related expenses such as tuition, books, supplies, travel to conferences, research activities as well as other needs. Matthew’s current research focuses on how the human motor system influences limb control. The military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the insurgents’ use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), have led to a dramatic increase in the number of otherwise healthy, adaptable individuals missing limbs. Prosthetic limbs that could respond to an individuals thoughts as naturally as their own body would greatly increase their quality of life. The ARCS funding will support him as he investigates how the motor system responds to unexpected perturbations in movement. By understanding and modeling how different parts of the brain influence upper-limb motor control, new insights will be gained that may greatly improve the next generation of brain-controled prosthetics.

Congratulations on your scholarship Matthew, and good luck with your research!

Categories Media News

Sri Sarma featured in MIT Magazine

Assistant Professor Sridevi Sarma was recently highlighted in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems News Magazine. The story by Katharine Stoel Gammon talks about Dr. Sarma’s work from the time she was a post-doc in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT and how research in the framework of control systems combined with her personal connections to Parkinson’s disease to guide the direction of her research.

Click here to read the full story.

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Sridevi Sarma receives $2 million National Science Foundation grant

Dr. Sridevi V. Sarma of the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant of $2,000,000 for support of the project entitled “EFRI-M3C: Robust Decoder-Compensator Architecture for Interactive Control of High-Speed and Loaded Movements”. The research involves developing a novel model-based Robust Decoder-Compensator (RDC) architecture for interactive control of fast movements in the presence of uncertainty. The RDC is a feedback interconnection that 1) decodes cortical signals to produce actuator commands that reflect motor intent, 2) corrects for spurious signals generated by the cerebellum in the absence of proprioceptive feedback, and 3) makes robust the interconnection to account for mismatches between models and reality. A unique experimental paradigm will be exploited wherein neural spike and local field potential data from patients with implantable electrodes admitted for epilepsy surgery will be collected.

Collaborators on the project John Thomas Gale, Munther A. Dahleh, and Nitish Thakor. The award is effective September 15, 2011 and expires August 31, 2015.

Congratulations to Dr. Sarma!

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Sri Sarma featured in Hopkins Medicine News

The research of Assistant Professor Sridevi Sarma has recently been featured in 2 individual articles for Johns Hopkins Medicine News. The first article discusses her research with Parkinson’s Disease and the use of “computational tools to understand and fine-tune deep brain stimulation” (click here to view). The second news story highlights Sri’s personal connection to Parkinson’s disease that shaped her research in electrical engineering and its applications to the disease (click here to read).

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Matthew Kerr receives a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Matthew Kerr, a newly appointed PhD student in the lab of Dr. Sridevi Sarma, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides a stipend of $30,000 per year for three years and eligibility to apply for supercomputing time. Selection for the award was based on “outstanding abilities and accomplishments, as well as [the] potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the US science and engineering enterprise.”

Matthew’s research focuses on two aspects of neural decoding. “The first is understanding the brain as a network and using that knowledge to anticipate the onset of neural conditions such as seizures. The second is determining how the motor cortex encodes movement and applying that knowledge toward improving upper limb prostheses.”

Congratulations on your Fellowship award Matthew!