Can flickering light and sound help in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease?
#ICYMI, BME's Holy Shift! podcast with @drannabellesinger.bsky.social explores how her early interest in theater lighting led to groundbreaking research on brain rhythms and memory.
🎧: holyshiftresearch.transistor.fm/5
Second preprint from the lab. Collab with @dkoveal.bsky.social, with many more to come! Effort led by @xshirleyz.bsky.social with help from Brittany Addison, @ezeyulu00.bsky.social, Claire Deng (on the grad school market, better act fast, Claire’s amazing!), @ajemanuel.bsky.social, and many others!
"...Add soccer practice and music lessons and doctors’ appointments, and so begins a tormented dance of the privileged, to-ing and fro-ing through rush hour as any zest for life disintegrates." This one sentence eloquently tells the story of a daily parenting struggle www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/u...
Check out this podcast highlighting our research and BME research more broadly. Thanks @danzigerzachary.bsky.social and Erin Buckley for making this happen
Garrett Stanley and I are leading the recruitment of a senior faculty position in BME at Georgia Tech and Emory, focused on Neural Engineering. Come talk to us, we're looking for a leader in research and training, in areas with neurotranslation potential.
More details here:
lnkd.in/eusCqCSR
Submissions for late-breaking abstracts are now open!
Share your most recent and exciting research with a global audience at #SfN25.
Submit your late-breaking abstract by Wednesday, September 10.
🔗 vist.ly/45gzc
#neurosky #neuroskyence #academicchatter
and was made possible by collaborations with the labs of Levi Wood and @sloanlab.bsky.social
Preprint is here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
This work points towards a promising, non-invasive path for building resilience to stress and stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders. This study was made possible via generous support from the @brightfocus.bsky.social, @alzassociation.bsky.social, and the NIH
Tina’s idea turned out to be true, and we were surprised to find that 10Hz sensory stimulation was the most beneficial in males, while 40Hz was the most beneficial in females. This is a fundamentally new approach to mitigate the damaging effects of chronic stress.
Tina’s insight was based putting together separate fields showing, on the one hand that chronic stress causes damage via maladaptive neuroimmune responses and on the other hand that sensory stimulation alters neuroimmune function in unstressed conditions.
Can we experience stress without the damaging effects? Here, we find that non-invasive sensory stimulation at the right frequency induces stress resilience. Tina started this project with a creative idea: can we use sensory stimulation to prevent the damaging effects of chronic stress?
Check out new findings from @TinaFranklin: "Sensory neurostimulation promotes stress resilience with frequency-specificity" on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Chronic stress is a major risk factor for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, but for many of us it's unavoidable.
#SfN25 provides an unparalleled scientific program highlighting emerging science from across the field.
Get a first look at speakers, events, lectures, and more in the Neuroscience 2025 Preliminary Program.
🔗 vist.ly/3xvcw
Drop a comment below to let us know your big three!
#neurosky
and by funding from the CART foundation, the NIH, the NSF, the BrightFocus foundation, and the Alzheimer’s Association. The paper is here: doi.org/10.1063/5.02...
These insights enable stimulation “tuning” to target specific functions. This work also highlights how flicker stimulation has multiple biological effects and we think such a multipotent therapeutic approach is required for neurodegenerative diseases. This study was made possible by Levi Wood’s lab
Check out new work by Sara Bitarafan showing that the frequency and duration of audiovisual flicker stimulation are key variables that dictate how flicker affects immune, neuronal, and metabolic genes in the context of Alzheimer’s disease pathology: doi.org/10.1063/5.02....
@stephmprince.bsky.social's recent paper was included in the Editors’ page “From brain to behaviour”. Check it out here: www.nature.com/collections/...
Editors’ Highlights pages showcase exciting recent papers in an area.
Joshua Stewart explains our recent paper by @stephmprince.bsky.social on how our brains adapt in a dynamic environment to still reach our destination: coe.gatech.edu/news/2025/06... This work was supported by the NIH, NSF, McCamish Foundation, and Packard Foundation
I can be your sponsor
No but I'd love to know how it goes. 😬
SFN abstracts are due Wednesday, June 4, at 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
Steph pioneered this new take on prospective codes including this complex behavior. The paper would not have been possible without the help of Danielle Cushing. Link for the smart PDF: rdcu.be/enokS
These findings clarify long-standing debates about whether these codes steer behavior towards upcoming choices or represent all possible paths.
Finally, we find that hippocampal representations of the new future goal increased more when animals needed to adapt their behavior more in response to the new information. This shows that the degree of adaptation needed is a key overlooked variable regulating prospective codes.
This shows for the first time that prospective codes are actively modulated by new task-relevant information.
In hippocampus, we found that new, pivotal information causes non-local representations of both possible goal locations to rapidly increase, simulating both possible outcomes. In prefrontal cortex we found that pivotal information causes choice codes to rapidly switch to represent the new choice.
To do this, Steph developed a new behavioral paradigm in which we leverage a dynamic, virtual-reality environment to precisely control the introduction of new information while animal’s choices are evolving in a memory-based decision-making task.
We live in a dynamic world, but we often study navigation as if the world is static. So how do we flexibly adapt in the face of new, pivotal information? @stephmprince.bsky.social addresses just that question in her latest paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41....
Excited to share the last project from my PhD is officially published: www.nature.com/articles/s41...!
