Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,
With move-in week beginning in earnest today, we are just days from the beginning of our fall classes. I hope you’ll take a minute to watch this short welcome video that enlists some of our campus icons to welcome everyone to the start of a semester that will look like no other in our history.
Illinois Community PledgeHelp protect those around us.
NSP Commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
NSP faculty Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton
Pulling Apart the BrainThe Interactive 3D brain model from BrainFacts.org.
URBANA, Ill. – Food additives get a bad rap, but a natural ingredient from orange peels and apple skins, pectin, is a thickener safely added to many food products, most notably jellies. The additive is also the subject of a University of Illinois experiment highlighting both the power and the challenges of public-private partnerships in university research.
More Department News
- Okada and colleagues videotaped more than a dozen hours of fights between 17 pairs of fish and then analyzed what happened—and when—in each fight. The longer the fight, the more the fish synchronize their behavior, timing their circling, striking, and biting more than anyone had ever realized, the researchers report today in PLOS Genetics.
Simple Aesthetic Sense and Addiction Emerge in Neural Relations of Cost-Benefit Decision in Foraging
A rudimentary aesthetic sense is found in the stimulus valuations and cost-benefit decisions made by primitive generalist foragers. These are based on factors governing personal economic decisions: incentive, appetite, and learning. We find that the addictive process is an extreme expression of aesthetic dynamics. An interactive, agent-based model, ASIMOV, reproduces a simple aesthetic sense from known neural relations of cost-benefit decision in foraging. In the presence of very high reward, an addiction-like process emerges. A drug-like prey provides extreme reward with no nutritive value, initiating high selectivity and prolonged cravings for drug through reward learning. Varying reward experience, caused by homeostatic changes in the neural circuitry of reward, further establishes the course of addiction, consisting of desensitization, withdrawal, resensitization, and associated changes in nutritional choice and pain sensitivity. These observations are consistent with the early evolution of addiction mechanisms in simple generalist foragers as an aesthetic sense for evaluating prey. ASIMOV is accessible to inspection, modification, and experiment, is adaptable as an educational tool, and provides insight on the possible coevolutionary origins of aesthetics and the addiction process.- “These are the beginnings of a direction toward interactive biological devices that could have applications for neurocomputing and for restorative medicine,” Gillette said. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers developed the tiny walking “spinobots,” powered by rat muscle and spinal cord tissue on a soft, 3D-printed hydrogel skeleton. While previous generations of biological robots, or bio-bots, could move forward by simple muscle contraction, the integration of the spinal cord gives them a more natural walking rhythm, said study leader Martha Gillette, (Director of the Neuroscience Program and) a professor of cell and developmental biology.
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Faculty Spotlight
How would you describe your background? (I.E. where you are from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) At the end of high school, I was trying to choose between psychology and chemistry. What convinced me to go to psychology was my aunt, who was a neurologist. I was having conversations with her and realized I really liked it. I started psychology as an undergraduate with an interest in physiology. From the get-go I started doing what was then called biopsychology, now it’s called cognitive neuroscience. At the end of my undergraduate studies, I applied for grad school at UIUC and came here as a graduate student. My graduate education is from Illinois. Then I left for 10 years. I had a position as a research scientist at New York State Psychiatric Institute for four years, then I got a tenure track position at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. Illinois out of the blue called me asking whether I would be interested in coming back as faculty, so I came back here in 2001.
Alumni Spotlight
Career Development What field in Neuroscience did you study? What about the research process did you enjoy? Did you prefer gathering the data, brainstorming its meaning, the writing process, defending your research, presenting your research, etc. I studied circadian rhythms and the biological clock in the hypothalamus in the lab of Dr. Martha Gillette. We used a slice-in-a-dish model and I conducted electrophysiology in rat brain slices. I used this method to examine the signal transduction pathway of the hormone melatonin as it influenced the biological clock. I always enjoyed the actual experiments and the hands-on experience of working in the lab. As far as reporting results, I was more interested in the big picture and eventual clinical application to human medicine. I just never could get that excited about experimental results in my lab work (which was an indicator I was not in exactly the right career for me). I did enjoy synthesizing my work and giving presentations – eventually. As a grad student that first conference presentation was pretty scary. I also remember making all my slides by hand with CorelDRAW and Adobe Photoshop, before PowerPoint was standard.