Events

June 2015

Amanda Dortch, an undergraduate at Tougaloo College in Jackson, MS joined the lab for the summer.

Amanda is studying the role of gender and circadian phase on object recognition memory. 


 

May 2015

Krishan Aghi received his bachelor of science degree in Neuroscience and completed his honors work in the Burwell lab.

He used a disconnection paradigm to study how the perirhinal and postrhinal cortices interact in contextual learning.  In the fall, Krishan will begin study in the Berkeley Neuroscience Graduate Program.


 

May 2015

Devon Poeta and Bailey Willis received their Masters in Biotechnology from Brown for work completed in the lab.

Devon worked on optogenetic control of recognition memory. Bailey studied the peririrhinal and postrhinal efferents to prefrontal cortex.


 

April 2015

Rebecca was elected to the Memory Disorders Research Society.

She will present at the next meeting of the Society in Cambridge, UK in September 2015.


 

March 2015

Valerie Estela was awarded a three year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

The award will support her study of the role of the perirhinal cortex in representation of context.


 

February 2015

Dr. Victoria Heimer-McGinn is awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) as an Individual Postdoctoral Fellow (Parent F32).

Dr. Heimer-McGinn studies the brain’s ability to interpret environmental context, which informs the cognitive processes that guide behavior. Her NRSA proposal, titled “"Perirhinal contributions to postrhinal representations of context", is guided by the hypothesis that the rat postrhinal cortex (POR) combines spatial information with object information received from the perirhinal cortex (PER) in order to form complex representations of context. Dr. Heimer-McGinn will employ experimental lesion, electrophysiology, and optogenetic approaches in behaving rats to test this hypothesis.


 

January 2015

Inês Tomás Pereira is awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship from Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox for Vision Research.

Dr. Pereira will record single units and local field potentials in the perirhinal and postrhinal cortices during a visual spontaneous object recognition task. 


 

August 2014

Rebecca Burwell delivered the Keynote address at the annual Women in Learning luncheon at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association

Professor Burwell talked about mentoring, increasing diversity in neuroscience, and new discoveries using optogenetic techniques.  Join now! http://www.womeninlearning.com/ 


 

May 27, 2014

Tara Jacobson is awarded a two year fellowship in Translational Neuroscience from the Norman Prince Neuroscience Institute

Dr. Jacobson is working on a collaboration between the Burwell laboratory and the laboratories of Drs. Steve Rasmussen and Ben Greenberg in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. The ultimate goal is to develop a new model paradigm for studying the circuitry underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder.


 

May 7, 2014

Amanda Liu wins the Whalen Award for Excellence in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology

On the basis of her Neuroscience Honors thesis, Amanda was selected as the 2014 recipient of the Whalen Award for Excellence in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. The award was presented at the annual Schlosberg dinner given by the Brown University Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences.


 

April 22, 2014

Krishan Aghi wins the Royce Fellowship to begin his honors work in the summer of 2014

Established in 1996 through the generosity of Charles Royce, a 1961 graduate of Brown University, the Royce Fellowship Program supports Brown University undergraduates as they carry out independent projects of their own design. Every spring, up to twenty students at Brown are inducted into the Society of Royce Fellows, each receiving an award to pursue a research.


 

April 15, 2014

Inês Tomás Pereira is awarded a fellowship from Brown University's Center for Vision Research. 

Dr. Pereira is spending her fellowship working studying the role of the perirhinal and postrhinal cortices on visual object recognition using a spontaneous object recognition task in combination with electrophysiology and optogenetics.


 

October 4, 2013

Ho and Heimer-McGinn give presentation at Wheeler School

Jonathan Ho and Victoria Heimer-McGinn gave a presentation in the Scientific Lecture Series at Wheeler School in Providence, RI. Jonathan and Victoria outlined their colorful career paths and gave the students a flavor of their research carried out in past and present laboratories. The students, ranging from high school freshmen to seniors, showed great interest in the lectures and were very welcoming to their guests. Shown are Jon on the left and Victoria on the right with Layla Kazemi, Sara Kazemi, and Kathleen Sai-Halasz.


 

September 3, 2013

Lisa Dokovna receives her Masters of Science in Psychology

Lisa completed her thesis entitled, "The Neural Basis of Attention: Interconnections of the Lateral Posterior Nucleus and Postrhinal Cortex of the Rat." Congratulations!


 

July 26, 2013

Kristin Marie Kerr Scaplen receives her PhD in Neuroscience

Kristin's thesis is entitled, "Landmark and object processing in the rodent hippocampal system: Implications for spatial memory." Her committee members were Julie Kauer, James Knierim, and David Sheinberg. Congratulations!


 

April 26, 2013

Jonathan Ho and Tara Jacobson win a grant from Plexon to publish in JoVE

Jon and Tara submitted the  winning abstract titled “Getting the most out of your rats: fully automated cognitive tasks for recording neural activity using a floor projection maze.” Congratulations!