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URMC / Department of Neuroscience / Events / Visiting Speakers

Visiting Speakers

The Measure of Change: Addressing the need for precise cognitive tools in the digital age

Vicroria Leavitt, PhD - Associate Professor of Neuropsychology, Columbia Univ. Irving Medical Center

Jan 22, 2025 @ 11:30 a.m.

Accurate measurement of cognitive change is essential for research and clinical care in neurologic populations. Precision tools allow the identification of neural substrates and permit the detection of meaningful change on the individual patient level. The digital age presents an opportunity to develop superior measurement instruments leveraging scalability, reliability, and ecological validity. We aimed to develop a tool that would be acceptable across cultures, in diverse socioeconomic, technology‐level, literacy‐level, and geographic populations. To optimize our tool to detect subtle cognitive change (e.g., as a marker of preclinical dementia), we created a 'cognitive stress test,' that would be impervious to floor and ceiling effects, and personalizable: the Language & Memory Test (LMT), a brief (4 minutes), multimodal, unsupervised digital test. To date, the LMT has been administered to over 1000 people in 4 countries in 3 countries, in urban and rural dwelling areas, to technology‐naive and low‐education individuals, and in ethnically/racially diverse communities. Initial psychometric properties of the test are encouraging; feasibility, acceptability, and usability are strong. Ongoing research with the LMT includes pilots in a USbased audiology clinic, in rural India, an MS clinic in Prague, and a collaboration with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University to evaluate simultaneous EEG during LMT performance. We have discovered posture/behavior syllable‐related ensembles in the brain.

Medical Center | 2-6424 SMD Large Aud.

Host: Univ. Rochester SMD, Dept. Neuroscience, and Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience

Epigenetics: a mediator of environmental risk for Parkinson’s disease

Alison Bernstein, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor, Rutgers University Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology

Mar 26, 2025 @ 11:30 a.m.

While there is debate about the magnitude of the relative contributions of genetic and environmental risk factors in the etiology of sporadic Parkinsons disease (sPD), it is well-documented that environmental risk factors and gene-environment interactions play a critical role in disease pathogenesis in most PD cases. However, the relatively large contribution of environmental risk factors in the overwhelming majority of PD cases has been widely neglected in the field. Toxicant exposures that contribute to PD risk may be temporally separated from disease onset, increasing susceptibility of these neurons to aging and subsequent neurotoxic insults without causing dopaminergic dysfunction on their own. The epigenome, and DNA modifications in particular, are recognized as an important mediator or the long-term effects of exposures across the lifespan. Thus, my lab focuses on how epigenetic modifications mediate neurotoxicological effects and gene-environment interactions in PD. We recently identified epigenetic changes associated with PD in human post-mortem brain tissue in genes related to the PD risk gene LRRK2 and endolysosomal sorting (RAB32 and AGAP1), PARK7 (DJ-1), SLC17A6 (VGLUT2), PTPRN2 (IA-2β), and NR4A2 (NURR1), as well as genes involved in neuroinflammation, neurodevelopment, neurotransmitter packaging and release, and axon and neuron projection guidance. We have also developed a two-hit mouse model that combines developmental dieldrin exposure with the α-synuclein preformed fibril (α-syn PFF) model to model increased disease susceptibility. In this model, male mice developmentally exposed to dieldrin have increased susceptibility to α-syn PFF-induced neurotoxicity. We identified dieldrin-induced changes in DNA modifications from birth to 9 months in pathways related to neurodevelopment, dopaminergic neuron differentiation, synaptogenesis, synaptic plasticity, and glial-neuron interactions, suggesting that developmental dieldrin exposure disrupts epigenetic regulation of critical neurodevelopmental pathways, impacting the risk of late-life disease. This model offers an opportunity to explore the persistent effects of environmental exposures and identify pre-degenerative changes that occur before the onset of neurodegeneration, setting the stage for increased susceptibility to disease.

Medical Center | SMD Large Auditorium (2-6424)

Host: University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry Departments of Neuroscience and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience

Neuroinflammation is a critical component and mechanisms of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

Jonathan Cherry, PhD - Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Boston University

Apr 30, 2025 @ 4:00 p.m.

Medical Center | K307 (3-6408)

Host: Department of Neuroscience and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience

Functional connectivity constrained simulations of visuomotor circuits in zebrafish

Eva Aimable Naumann, PhD - Assistant Professor of Neurobiology, Duke University

May 07, 2025 @ 11:30 a.m.

Medical Center | K207 (2-6408)

Host: Department of Neuroscience and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience