Alumni talk series: Corinde Wiers (Washington) and Mostafa Nashaat Abdelhamid (Berlin)
Map to venue:
Café Flora Soft Haus 19 on Campus Nord (pdf)
Corinde Wiers was a member of doctoral cohort 4 (2010). Her doctoral project on “The automatic pull of drug cues in addiction: neural correlates and effects of re-training” was supervised by Felix Bermpohl and Henrik Walter.
Corinde is currently a Research Fellow at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland, in the laboratory of Nora Volkow. She uses brain imaging techniques (PET and MRI) to investigate toxic effects and addictive properties of drugs of abuse.
Abstract talk: “Neuroimaging studies in substance use disorders”
Substance use disorder has been proposed as a chronic relapsing brain disease, rather than a “weakness of will”. In my PhD I worked on attentional biases involved in addiction, and found that heavy smokers and patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD), despite explicit wishes to stay abstinent, show automatic approach behavior towards drug-related stimuli, associated with stronger activations in brain reward circuitries. In 2014, I joined the Laboratory of Neuroimaging at the NIH as a postdoc and conducted experiments with PET: we found that reductions in Dopamine D2 receptor availability in striatum observed in cocaine abusers (which has been associated with drug craving and rewarding properties of drugs) were mediated by disrupted sleep patterns, proposing disrupted sleep as a potential target for therapy in cocaine abuse. Furthermore, in smokers and cannabis users we found blunted brain dopaminergic and metabolic responses to a stimulant drug challenge. In patients with AUD, we studied neuroinflammation and brain glucose metabolism, and for both showed lower signals in patients with AUD compared to non-abusing controls. Acetate (a metabolite of alcohol), however, was found to be elevated in the brains of patients with AUD, suggesting a shift from glucose to acetate metabolism in the brain as an energy source in AUD. We currently investigate whether a “ketogenic diet” (a high fat, low carbohydrate and glucose diet) intervention in AUD during detoxification has beneficial effects on withdrawal symptoms, craving, sleep, and whether it increases ketone bodies in the brain, such as acetate. That is, if during periods of active drinking the brain primarily uses acetate as an energy fuel, then a sudden shift from acetate to glucose metabolism (e.g., obtained by eating an American diet) during detoxification, this may be toxic to the brain. I will present pilot data on this project.
Mostafa Nashaat Abdelhamid was a member of doctoral cohort 7 (2013). His doctoral project was focused on engineering methods in systemic neuroscience, that allow studying animal sensory perception in a complex multiple dimensional scale supervised by Matthew Larkum and Michael Pauen.
Subsequently, Mostafa received a postdoctoral research grant from the Einstein Foundation Berlin and continued as a postdoctoral scientist in the lab of Matthew Larkum. The general theme of their project is to investigate the functional role of feedback in shaping sensory representation on the network level and to study cellular-level implementation by which feedforward and feedback information are integrated during perceptual decision-making.
Abstract talk: “From spines to cognition: Studying the mechanisms of cognitive neuroscience”
Natural behavior occurs in multiple sensory and motor modalities and is dependent on sensory feedback that constantly adjusts behavior. To investigate the underlying neuronal correlates of natural behavior on a subcellular and cellular resolution, it is indispensable to have access to state-of-the-art recording equipment (e.g. 2-photon imaging, patch recordings, etc.) that frequently requires head-fixation. However, head-fixation imposes several behavioral disadvantages that requires complex and expensive implementation to study very simple unimodal behaviors with limited behavioral repertoire. In my thesis, I developed a novel tool, a floating reality environment so called “Air-Track”, an easy-to-build, head-fixed behavioral environment that requires only minimal computational processing. The Floating Reality environment is a convenient “one-size-fits-all” solution that facilitates the combination of quantitative natural behavior with virtually any system for monitoring or manipulating brain activity in a neuroscience laboratory. I utilize the concept of floating reality systems to design complex behavioral paradigms in freely moving and head-fixed mice that allow a sub-cellular level investigation of these complex behaviors.
In my talk, I tackle the assets of utilizing the state-of-the-art technology in studying cellular mechanisms in neuroscience. Further, I discuss the posing conceptual, theoretical and technical challenges that system neuroscientists encounter through their endeavor to investigate the mechanisms of cognitive neuroscience.
