Location: Searle Center Lecture HallHighlighting the work of Duke CTSA TL1 and KL2 scholars, UNC and Wake Forest KL2 scholars, and Duke KURe scholars. Please plan to join us for an informative panel discussion, scholar presentations and a moderated poster session. We will also celebrate the graduation of KL2 and TL1 scholars who completed the program at the end of the symposium. Please plan to join us for this congratulatory reception in the rear of the Searle Center Lecture Hall.More infoRegistration

Location: Bryan Research 103Dr. Schaefer is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and a Seaver Fellow at the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She did her graduate studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Charité University Berlin and The Rockefeller University in New York. In the fall of 2004 she joined Dr. Paul Greengard's Laboratory at The Rockefeller University where she completed her postdoctoral studies and was promoted to Research Associate in 2007 and Senior Research Associate in 2009. She joined the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine to start her own laboratory in 2011. Her research is focused on understanding how epigenetic mechanisms contribute to maintenance of specialized neuronal functions and their alteration during psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.

Location: Trent Seamans Center, Great HallRobert J. Lefkowitz, M.D. Distinguished LectureReception to followRegister

Location: MSRB III 1125 (Seminar Room)StatGen Seminar SeriesA major challenge in the age of Big Data is the integration of disparate data types into a data analysis. That is tackled here in the context of data blocks measured on a common set of experimental subjects. This data structure motivates the simultaneous exploration of the joint and individual variation within each data block. This is done here in a way that scales well to large data sets (with blocks of wildly disparate size), using principal angle analysis, careful formulation of the underlying linear algebra, and differing outputs depending on the analytical goals. Ideas are illustrated using cancer and neuroimaging data sets.

This seminar is the last of three Duke Genomic Medicine Collaboratory Director Candidate seminars.In this seminar, come here Geoffrey Ginsburg, M.D., Ph.D. present his vision for the Genomics Collaboratory. Lunch will be provided 

Location: Bryan Research 103Research in my lab focuses on the general question of how experience acts on the nervous system to shape behavior. Our goal is to account for learning by understanding the sensory stimuli that drive change, how and where those stimuli are represented in patterns of neural activity, and how those patterns act to modify behavior. We hope both to reveal general learning mechanisms, and to understand how variations in those mechanisms give rise to individual differences in behavior. Hence, we are interested in how the nervous system changes over the course of development to give rise to 'critical periods' for learning and how innate variations between individuals interact with experience to give rise to differences in learned behaviors. Towards this end, we employ a variety of behavioral, neurophysiological and genetic approaches to investigate vocal learning in songbirds.

Location: Bryan Research 103The goal of our laboratory is to reveal the neural basis of perception. More specifically, we want to understand exactly how cortical microcircuits process sensory information to drive behavior. While decades of research have carefully outlined how individual neurons extract specific features from the sensory environment, the cellular and synaptic mechanisms that permit ensembles of cortical neurons to actually process sensory information and generate perceptions are largely unknown.

A High Throughput Sequencing Course is being offered by the Duke Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. This is an intensive, six-week, multi-disciplinary course covering the biological, statistical, computational and informatics knowledge for implementing a well-designed genomics experiment, with RNA Sequencing as a central focus. Central components of the course are hands-on library preparation and data analysis.The course will run from May 20, 2019 to June 27, 2019.This course is funded through NIH's Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, which fully covers tuition for all course participants, as well as on-campus room-and-board for a limited number of participants. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are welcome to apply. They also welcome high-school or undergraduate STEM faculty.View Course FlyerMore InfoQuestions? Contact htscourse@duke.edu

Location: Bryan Research 103Stress and pain-induced behavior is controlled by specific neurotransmitters and their signaling partners in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Many of these signals are conveyed through activation of neuropeptide and monoamine receptor systems. These receptors are seven transmembrane spanning G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR, also called 7 transmembrane receptors) and they engage a variety of signaling cascades following neurotransmitter release and receptor binding. To expand our knowledge of the inner workings of the brain and to identify treatments for psychiatric diseases, the Bruchas laboratory aims to dissect how GPCR systems function in the contexts of stress, depression, addiction, and pain. We strive for a greater understanding of these receptors in real time, within intact systems, and biologically relevant models of behavior. We utilize pharmacological, optogenetic, genetic, viral, imaging, behavioral, and cutting-edge engineering approaches to uncover the specific role of GPCRs and their endogenous transmitters within in vivo neural circuits that modulate affective behavior.

Location: Bryan Research 103The Andermann Lab seeks to understand how the needs of the body determine which sensory cues are attended to, learned, and remembered. In particular, they are investigating how natural and experimentally induced states of hunger modulate neural representations of food cues, and the consequences for obesity, binge eating, and other eating disorders. Previous studies support a simple model for hunger-dependent processing of food cues: During states of satiety, food cue information enters sensory neocortex but may not flow to cortical areas involved in selective processing of motivationally salient food cues, such as postrhinal cortex (POR). It has been suggested that during states of hunger, POR may be attentionally 'primed' such that food cue information spreads from visual cortex through POR to amygdala and on to lateral hypothalamic neurons involved in food-seeking behavior. They are investigating the mechanisms by which genetically, anatomically and chemically defined classes of cortical neurons facilitate cue-induced feeding in a hunger-dependent manner. Such motivation-specific priming of cortical sensory representations may arise from amygdalar and hypothalamic synaptic inputs to cortex, as well as from local hormonal and neuromodulatory actions on specific cortical neurons.

Location: Bryan Research 103The lab's goal is to understand the interplay of membrane-bound organelles, cytoskeletal structure, and metabolism as it relates to the organization and function of neurons, and the cells they interact with. On a small scale, we are interested in mapping out the spatial organization, stoichiometry, and dynamics of proteins as they interact with each other and with different parts of the cell. On a larger scale, we are trying to decipher how complex cellular behaviors arise, including cell crawling, polarization, cell-cell contact, cytokinesis, cell fate determination, viral budding, and intercellular transfer. To study these problems, we rely heavily on microscopy - including super-resolution imaging techniques and cutting edge fluorescence-based technologies - as well as biochemistry, in vitro reconstitution, and mathematical modeling.

Keynote SpeakersLesley Curtis, Ph.D., Chair and Professor, Department of Population Health Sciences, Interim Executive Director, Duke Clinical Research Institute Joseph Rogers, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Duke University Health System, Professor, Department, Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Member, Duke Clinical Research Institute Join fellow Duke researchers, June 21, and foster collaborations intended to have the highest impact on future obesity-related research and patient care. Delineate knowledge gaps for obesity-related research, brainstorm strategies, and develop a framework for an ideal learning health system model. More infoRegister

Application Deadline: April 1, 2019Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses ProgramThis intensive laboratory and lecture course will focus on cutting-edge proteomic approaches and technologies.Students will gain practical experience in sample preparation with in-solution digestion, then students will be trained using high-sensitivity nano LC-ESI-MS and tandem mass spectrometry. Different search engines and bioinformatic approaches will be introduced for data evaluation. For the shotgun proteomic analysis sections, students will use label-free and covalent isotopic-labeling quantitative approaches to profile changes. The aim of the course is to provide each student with the fundamental knowledge and hands-on experience necessary for performing and analyzing proteomic experiments. The overall goal is to train students to identify new opportunities and applications for proteomic approaches in their biological research.Part time instructors for this course include:Erik Soderblom, Duke Center for Genomic and Computational BiologyWill Thompson, Duke Center for Genomic and Computational BiologyCost (including board and lodging): $3,960 More Info