Tuesday, December 3rd from 1:30-3:00 pm in Arjona 307

Abstract: Socioeconomic disparities in childhood are associated with remarkable differences in cognitive and socio-emotional development during a time when dramatic changes are occurring in the brain. Recent work has focused on understanding the neurobiological pathways through which socioeconomic factors shape development. Behavioral evidence suggests that language, memory, social-emotional skills, and executive functions exhibit relatively large differences across socioeconomic lines, and more recent work has found differences in socioeconomic differences in brain structure in the very regions that support these skills. It is likely that socioeconomic factors operate via multiple mechanisms to explain the development of different neural circuits. A theoretical model will be presented whereby differences in the home language environment and family stress likely impact particular brain systems, which in turn support distinct neurocognitive skills. Evidence for the model, as well as ongoing and future work testing aspects of the model, will be discussed. Finally, the question of interventions will be addressed, along with an overview of Baby’s First Years, the first clinical trial of poverty reduction in early childhood.

Bio:Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She received her undergraduate, graduate and medical degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. As a neuroscientist and board-certified pediatrician, she studies how socioeconomic inequality relates to in children’s cognitive and brain development.  Her work examines socioeconomic disparities in cognitive development, as well as brain structure and function, across infancy, childhood and adolescence. She is particularly interested in understanding how early in infancy or toddlerhood such disparities develop; the modifiable environmental differences that account for these disparities; and the ways we might harness this research to inform the design of interventions. She is one of the principal investigators of the Baby’s First Years study: the first clinical trial of poverty reduction to assess the causal impact of income on children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development in the first three years of life. Dr. Noble was elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and was awarded a 2017 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Her work linking family income to brain structure across childhood and adolescence has received worldwide attention in the popular press.

**Register here for Webex**

Please email birc@uconn.edu if you are interested in meeting with a speaker. Click here to see the full BIRC Speaker Series schedule and access recordings of past talks.

Brown University

Tuesday, November 5th from 1:30-3:00 pm in Arjona 307

Abstract: EEG and MEG are the leading methods to non-invasively record human neural dynamics with millisecond temporal resolution. However, it can be extremely difficult to infer the underlying cellular and circuit level origins of these macro-scale signals without simultaneous invasive recordings. This limits the translation of EEG/MEG into novel principles of information processing, or into new treatment modalities for neural pathologies. To address this need, we developed the Human Neocortical Neurosolver (HNN: https://hnn.brown.edu), a new user-friendly neural modeling tool designed to help researchers and clinicians interpret human imaging data. In this talk, I will give an overview of this new tool and describe an application to study the origin and meaning of 15-29Hz beta frequency oscillations, known to be important for sensory and motor function. I will also touch on other applications of HNN to study the mechanistic origin of functionally relevant human EEG/MEG and modulation in these signals with non-invasive brain stimulation. In total, HNN provides an unpresented biophysically principled tool to link mechanism to meaning of human EEG/MEG signals.

Bio: Stephanie R. Jones, PhD is Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University. She received her doctorate in mathematics from Boston University, followed by training in neuroscience and human MEG/EEG at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research program integrates these disciplines to develop biophysically principled computational neural models that bridge the critical gap between human MEG/EEG brain imaging signals and their underlying cellular and network level generators. Dr. Jones’s group is currently expanding their interdisciplinary program to the field of non-invasive brain stimulation. A primary goal is to translate an understanding of the network mechanism underlying non-invasively measured brain signals into brain stimulation strategies to improve disrupted brain function.

**To view this talk remotely via Webex, please register hereby October 29th**

Please email birc@uconn.edu if you are interested in meeting with a speaker. Click here to see the full BIRC Speaker Series schedule and access recordings of past talks.