Few scientists have made as many important discoveries as Dr. Ichiji Tasaki, shown here with his wife and lab partner Nobuko, using many instruments that he made or modified himself.
If you’ve ever skipped meals for a whole day or gone on a strict, low-calorie diet, you know just how powerful the feeling of hunger can be. Your stomach may growl and rumble, but, ultimately, it’s your brain that signals when to start eating—and when to stop. So, learning more about the brain’s complex role in controlling appetite is crucial to efforts to develop better ways of helping the millions of Americans afflicted with obesity.
As a child I liked robots. Growing up in Korea, I liked cartoons and movies where people were on a mission to save the world with the robots they invented, and I wanted to develop a superhero robot someday, too. While my robot isn’t yet complete, the path I followed in pursuit of my goals eventually led me to explore data analysis.
And here I am, a postdoc at the NIH—probably the largest healthcare research institution in the world—in the Imaging Biomarkers and Computer-Aided Diagnosis Laboratory led by Dr. Ronald M. Summers. Our lab is part of the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center.
Have you ever wondered why someone becomes a biochemist or a biophysicist, or how to find a career in both fields at the same time? Peter Bandettini, Ph.D., is Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Facility and Chief of the Unit on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In the interview below, he shares some thoughts on what motivates him and what it's like working at the NIH IRP.
As a recently graduated student at the NIH, in partnership with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I felt so privileged to be a member of this amazing community of scientists, and I want to create awareness that there are opportunities for graduate students to do research in the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP). The NIH IRP provides training to scientists at every level of experience.
The brain’s complexity and how its coordinated actions of billions of neurons shape our behavior and cognition have always fascinated me. So, I decided to go into neuroscience as a career and contribute to biomedical science.
"I felt that seeing this dissolution of everything that makes us who and what we are in patients really told me a lot about what makes us human. At the same time I felt very frustrated that there was so little that we could do to help our patients with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia."
Mitochondria are dynamic cellular organelles involved in ATP synthesis and in apoptotic mechanisms (programmed cell death). However, in addition to these classically known functions, recent studies at the NIH have deciphered another intriguing role for mitochondria in the development and plasticity of neurons.
The NIH Research Festival always has a strong theme running through it, from “Bench-to-Bedside” in 2002 and “Chromosomes in Modern Biology and Medicine” in 2007 to “The NIH at 125: Today's Discoveries, Tomorrow's Cures” in 2012. The year 2014 was no different, but it marked the first time that the Festival was focused on a single organ within the human body: the brain.
Let’s start with some numbers: 30,000 neuroscientists, five days, and 20 pages of notes. It all adds up to a week well spent at the recent Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Washington, D.C. Researchers from around the world, many from the NIH IRP, descended on the Washington Convention Center to share their most recent research, discoveries, thoughts, and future ideas.
