brain

Summertime Brains: Francia Fang

Francia Fang, who is currently a junior at Duke University, spent her 2017 summer working in the lab of NIH IRP Senior Investigator Dr. Zhengping Zhuang. During her time at the NIH, Fang investigated how genes influence the development of brain tumors and also shadowed doctors as they met with brain cancer patients.

The video above, featuring Fang, is the first in a series of profiles highlighting IRP summer interns who worked in NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) intramural labs this past summer.

Medallions and Medicine

Mantova front

Medallions and coins are both beautiful artwork and symbols of what achievements and people we value. These are some of the beautiful medallions and coins in the NIH History Office collection—and the stories that go with them.

Ebola Virus: Lessons from a Unique Survivor

Reblogged from The NIH Director's Blog.

Ebola virus (green) is shown on cell surface

There are new reports of an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This news comes just two years after international control efforts eventually contained an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, though before control was achieved, more than 11,000 people died—the largest known Ebola outbreak in human history. Many questions remain about why some people die from Ebola and others survive. Now, some answers are beginning to emerge thanks to a new detailed analysis of the immune responses of a unique Ebola survivor, a 34-year-old American health-care worker who was critically ill and cared for at the NIH Special Clinical Studies Unit in 2015.

Studying ADHD from Genes to the Brain Connectome

Contributed by an NIH clinical trial participant.

A magnetic resonance image (MRI) of a brain

My 8-year-old nephew Luke has a sixth-grade reading level, while still in the third grade. Yet, he often struggles to finish his chores. He carries a timer in his backpack to keep himself on task. His school provides Luke with special assistance, including extra time for tests and repeated, detailed instruction. The challenges arise because Luke, like his mother Rebecca, has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Developing Methods to Study the Brain's Visual System in Action

Robert Wurtz with camera element of eye movement recording apparatus

How does the brain know that what we’re looking at is standing still or moving? Dr. Robert H. Wurtz developed methods for studying the visual system, a technique now widely used for the study of higher brain functions, to find the answer to that question.

Four NIH IRP Researchers Elected to National Academy of Medicine

NIH National Academy of Medicine 2016

This year, members of the National Academy of Medicine elected four NIH Intramural researchers to their ranks, one of the highest honors in science. Learn a bit about each of their research and follow the links to their IRP profiles for more information.

Untangling Alzheimer’s Disease — DNA Damage in Alzheimer’s

Drs. Hyundong Song and Yujun Hou, standing together here in their lab, are postdoctoral fellows working to find ways that doctors may one day effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease.

Given that Alzheimer’s is such a complex disease with many causes and pathways, it is not surprising that the search for effective treatments has proven difficult. So I spoke with Drs. Yujun Hou and Hyundong Song, postdoctoral fellows in the IRP’s Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to learn more about their approaches to meeting the challenge.