Churchland lab

The McKnight Foundation has been a big supporter of neuroscience in recent years and holds an annual meeting for recipients of their awards. These include recipients of a Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award, a Technology award and a Scholars Award, which funds early stage investigators like me. This year at the meeting, my third, I was accompanied by a postdoc from my lab, Matt Kaufman, who received a special travel award. The travel awards for postdocs are new this year and are in honor of Dr. Allison J. Doupe, who was on the Board of Directors for the Scholar awards for a number of years. Allison passed away this past year and it was an honor for Matt to attend in her memory.

There were many interesting talks at the meeting. Two scientific highlights for us were:

1. Hearing about recent work from Ben Barres’s lab. He warns that A1 (bad) astrocytes proliferate in aging brains & may play a role in Alzheimer’s disease.

2. Some more comforting news about aging from Elizabeth Kensinger’s lab. She reported on the preserved ability of older adults to remember affective details of memories. In fact, older subjects sometimes outperformed younger subjects on this particular kind of memory.

Finally, a high point for us was presenting a poster (below) with new 2-photon imaging from the lab. This technique is new for us and will allow us to measure the responses of many neurons at the same time.