Chen Institute Fall Update!



	中文

Dear Friends,

We’re excited to share news of our inaugural AI Prize for Accelerated Research, organized in partnership with Science Magazine, to recognize young researchers who apply techniques in artificial intelligence to help the research community solve important problems and accelerate their work.

We’d also like to direct your attention to the “2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health” on November 7-8 and the “BCI Society – Chen Institute Joint BCI Meeting” on December 6-7 – both meetings will take place in Shanghai.

Thanks as always for your continuing support.

Kind regards,

Tianqiao Chen Chrissy Luo

KEY CHEN INSTITUTE MEETINGS

November 7, 2024

2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health

December 6-7, 2024

BCI Society – Chen Institute Joint BCI Meeting

TCCI IN THE NEWS

Two New Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators Named

Caltech professors Viviana Gradinaru and André Hoelz were named among 26 new investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). They join a community of more than 250 HHMI investigators across fields ranging from neuroscience to immunology to structural biology.

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience website

Andersen Receives Prize for Outstanding Achievements in Neurological Research

Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and director and Leadership Chair of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center at Caltech, was awarded the 2024 International Prize for Translational Neuroscience of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation.

Read more on thee TCCI for Neuroscience website

SUPPORTING THE COMMUNITY

September 29 - October 04, 2024

The 18th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2024

October 05-09, 2024

Neuroscience 2024

October 16, 2024

Mass General Research Institute and Chen Institute Joint Symposium

December 09-15, 2024

NeurIPS 2024

RESEARCH

Understanding Online Toxicity

In 2022, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Dean Mobbs began to investigate the relationship between social media use and mental health and well-being. As his research program ramps up to test brain activity and physiological markers of stress during social media use, Mobbs and his colleagues have constructed a theoretical model to highlight key differences between online and face-to-face communications.

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience website

Autism Research Via Smartphone

Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology and an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, has been researching autism for decades. In his Emotion and Social Cognition Lab, researchers get a finer grasp on the mechanics of the brain when processing emotion and interacting with others by studying both neurotypical individuals and those who have brain damage or brain malformations or who have neuropsychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience website

Genetic Foundations of Regeneration Remain Elusive

Recent research from Lior Pachter, Bren Professor of Computational Biology and Computing and Mathematical Sciences and an affiliated faculty member with TCCI for Neuroscience at Caltech and colleagues examines the genomes of five different animal species—axolotl, zebrafish, sea anemones, sea sponges, and sea cucumbers— that all have the ability to regenerate, but are evolutionarily distinct.

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience site

‘Magic Mushrooms’ Work by Scrambling Key Brain Network

In a new study researchers report that psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, temporarily scrambles a critical network of brain areas involved in introspective thinking such as daydreaming and remembering.

Read more about the research in Nature

Neural Network Learns to Build Maps using Minecraft

A new paper from the lab of Matt Thomson, assistant professor of computational biology, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator and affiliated faculty member of the TCCI for Neuroscience at Caltech, finds that neural networks can be designed to build spatial maps using a type of algorithm called predictive coding.

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience website

Intestinal Blastocystis is linked to healthier diets and more favorable cardiometabolic outcomes in 56,989 individuals from 32 countries

A team co-led by Long Nguyen, Chen Institute Department of Medicine Transformative Scholar, analyzed data from 56,989 gut microbiome samples from around the world and found that Blastocystis is more common in certain regions and among people with specific lifestyles and diets.

Read the article in the journal Cell

Beetles Conquered Earth by Evolving Their Own Biochemical Laboratory

A new study by researchers in the laboratory of Joe Parker, assistant professor of biology and biological engineering, Chen Scholar, and director of Caltech’s Center for Evolutionary Science looks into the evolutionary success of beetles who are the poster child of evolutionary success with about 400,000 known species and potentially hundreds of thousands more await discovery.

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience Website

TCCI Announces a Milestone of MindD Program: First Chinese EEG Dataset Published in Scientific Data, A Nature Portfolio Journal

Recently, a breakthrough study by Professor Quanying Liu from Southern University of Science and Technology and Professor Haiyan Wu from the University of Macau was published in Scientific Data, a Nature portfolio journal. This study introduced CihneseEEG, the first EEG dataset specifically designed for the Chinese language. It is also the first project funded by the MindD Program, a data support program initiated by the Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI®) in China.

Read more on the Read more on the TCCI website

Chen Institute Researchers in China showcase interdisciplinary innovation

Professor Ying Mao's team has pioneered a new method using mass spectrometry for rapid intraoperative diagnosis of gliomas, reducing the diagnosis time to 1.5 minutes; they have also revealed the role of neurotransmitter receptors in medulloblastoma subtypes. Professor Zhili Huang's team identified key neural circuits regulating emotional insomnia and unveiled the regulatory mechanisms of sleep, cognition, and motor function in the RBD models. Professor Tifei Yuan's team has unveiled the long-term effects of the coronavirus on risk decision-making and cortical function. Professor Jintai Yu's team improved the diagnostic and predictive accuracy for Alzheimer's disease using multiplex cerebrospinal fluid proteomics, and discovered genetic variants associated with brain iron accumulation.