Congratulations to Dr. Ben Deverett, who succesfully defended his PhD today. Ben has been a very valuable member of the Wang lab and the Tank lab. He contributed a thorough understanding of cerebellar Crus1 in a working memory task. His first-author papers can be found here and here, and he contributed to many more. Ben will continue with the MD part of his MD/PhD program.
Congratulations to Dr. Joey Broussard for news of funding of his submission for the prestigious NRSA postdoctoral fellowship supported by the BRAIN intiative. This award will allow him to unravel the mysteries of cerebellar granule cell encoding of a working memory task.
Patricia Aguiar and Christina Matl received their undergraduate degrees from Princeton University today. Congratulations Patricia and Christina! Patricia and Christina did their undergraduate research in the Wang lab, and were supervised by Dr. Kelly Seagraves and Dr. Jess Verpeut, respectively. We wish them both all the best in their future endeavors. Photo: Patricia Aguiar with her mentor Dr. Kelly Seagraves.
Congratulations to Dr. Kelly Seagraves who received the Unsung Hero Award as a recognition for her excellence in teaching with the Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) at Princeton University. She is praised for her 'willingness to step up, knowledge of people and procedures, and unflappable let's-just-keep-moving-forward style provide an anchor' for STEM instructors and students at Fort Dix. We are lucky to have such an amazing colleague in the lab.
Congratulations to Tingting Sun who received the Neuroscience undergraduate award for her work in the Wang lab studying mouse tail modeling and dynamics.
Congratulations to Dr. Tom Pisano who succesfully presented his Final Public Oral today! The Wang lab is very proud of his accomplishment and has been happy to have had Tom as a colleague in the lab. We wish him all the best in continuing his MD/PhD degree. Videos from his FPO can be found in the links below.
Dr. Marlies Oostland has received the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Union's Horizon2020 program for research on the neuroscience of tickling: cerebellar mechanisms and sensory prediction, which she will perform at Princeton University and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
The Wang lab has another paper published on Biorxiv today. Work by Ben Deverett, Mikhail Kislin, David Tank, and Sam Wang shows that during accumulation of somatosensory evidence, optogenetic manipulation of cerebellar Purkinje cells reduced the accuracy of subsequent memory-guided decisions and caused mice to downweight prior information. Behavioral deficits were consistent with the addition of noise and leak to the evidence accumulation process, suggesting the cerebellum can influence the maintenance of working memory contents.
