| Tue 7/22/14 9:15 am | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Robert Remez (Dept. of Psychology, Columbia University) |
| Modulation sensitivity in the perceptual organization of speech |
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| Tue 7/22/14 9:45 am | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Kathy Pichora-Fuller (Dept. of Psychology, Univ. Toronto Mississauga) |
| Effects of vocal emotion on speech understanding and memory in younger and older adults |
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| Tue 7/22/14 10:45 am | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Stefanie Kuchinsky (Center for Advanced Study of Language, Univ. Maryland) |
| Assessing variation in cognitive demands during speech recognition |
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| Tue 7/22/14 11:15 am | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Bruce Schneider (Dept. of Psychology, Univ. Toronto Mississauga) |
| How spoken language comprehension is achieved by older listeners in multi-talker conversations |
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| Tue 7/22/14 12 noon | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Liz Stine-Morrow (Dept. of Educational Psychology and Beckman Institute, Univ. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) |
| Age differences in language segmentation: What, how, and why? |
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| Tue 7/22/14 2 pm | Shapiro Campus Center Theater |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Mark Eckert (Dept. of Otolaryngology, Medical University of South Carolina) |
| Imaging intent to listen in older adults |
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| Tue 7/22/14 2:45 pm | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Jonathan Peelle (Dept. of Otolaryngology, Washington University in St. Louis) |
| The effect of age and acoustic challenge on memory for narrative speech |
|
| Tue 7/22/14 3:30 pm | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Cai Wingfield (Symplectic Ltd.) |
| Using multivariate analysis of fMRI data to investigate lexical representation |
|
| Tue 7/22/14 4 pm | Carl J. Shapiro Theater, Shapiro Campus Center |
| ArtWingfieldFest |
| Murray Grossman (Dept. of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania) |
| Neurobiology of conversation: What can we learn about aging from neurodegenerative disease? |
|
| Wed 7/23/14 4 pm | Gerstenzang 122 |
| MRSEC Summer Seminar (Mechanisms of Genetic Maintenance) |
| Vinay Eapen (Haber Lab) |
| DNA Damage Response and Cell Cycle Control |
DNA damage is a fact of cellular life . Cells exposed to DNA damage arrest prior to mitosis in order to allow enough time for the repair of damaged DNA. This phenomenon is termed as the DNA damage checkpoint and is vital to ensure the fidelity of the genome . Cells that fail to arrest in response to damage can accumulate deleterious mutations in their DNA. In the haber lab we use budding yeast as model organism ask the following questions. a) how does a cell know that it has suffered dna damage ? B) how does the cell maintain its checkpoint arrest? And c) how do cells turn off the DNA damage checkpoint ? I will present data elucidating some of these mechanism and their crosstalk with other cellular pathways. |
| Cara Pina (Lovett Lab) |
| Cellular DNA organization and the problem of keeping rope tangle free |
Cells contain a large amount of genetic material they must confine within a small space. Eukaryotic cells have the advantage of a membrane enclosed nucleus segregating DNA from the rest of the cell. Prokaryotic cell must find another way to confine their DNA and have solved this problem with the use of nucleoid associated proteins (NAPs). These NAPs have been shown to not only systematically organize prokaryotic DNA, but to modify the nucleoid shape in response to outside stimulus. I will discuss the continual investigation of the organizational properties of NAP and briefly address the potential link between nucleoid shape and stress response/survival in Escherichia coli and other bacteria. |
|
| Thu 7/24/14 4 pm | Abelson 229 |
| MRSEC Seminar |
| Tim Still (Dept. of Physics, University of Pennsylvania) |
| Colloidal Hydrogel Particles, Glass Transition, Jamming, and Friction |
Since the first synthesis of colloidal poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) particles by Pelton in 1986, stimuli-responsive colloidal hydrogels have become extremely versatile model systems to study a plethora of physical phenomena, including phase transitions, glass physics, and photonic materials. In this talk, I will first discuss some properties of temperature-responsive PNIPAM particles and how these properties depend on the synthesis scheme. The second part of the talk focuses on studies that employ such PNIPAM particles to investigate the liquid-solid transition as a function of packing fraction via rheology and microscopy. The relations between the glass transition and jamming physics will be elucidated. In a similar manner, microscopy allows us to measure phonons in soft colloidal crystals and glasses, and an analysis based on jamming theory enables us to estimate inter-particle friction between PNIPAM particles. |
| Hosted by Z. Dogic |
|
| Fri 7/25/14 12 noon | Gerstenzang 121 |
| Life Sciences Summer Seminar Series |
| Silvia Jansen (Goode Lab) |
| Biochemistry and genetics of yeast cytoskeleton |
| Hosted by Brandeis University Postdoc Association |
|
| Wed 7/30/14 9 am | Kutz 130 |
| Thesis Seminar (Graduate Program in Psychology) |
| Erin Bishop |
| Effectiveness of the Caring School Community Program in Reducing School Bullying and Victimization |
The Caring School Community (CSC) program is designed to incorporate an entire community (parents, peers, teachers, and staff) in enhancing children's lives through their social and emotional development. One intended consequence of the program is the reduction in child aggression, specifically aggression related to bullying and victimization. Bullying and victimization behaviors are linked to two types of aggression: proactive aggression, aggression used to achieve a goal, and reactive aggression, aggression used in response to a real or perceived act of hostility. The latter type of aggression is also linked to emotional dysregulation. Using an age-cohort design, we examined the effects of the CSC program on bullying, victimization, proactive aggression, reactive aggression, and emotional dysregulation in middle school students over a three year period. In addition to using a priori subscales to examine the effect of the CSC program on behaviors and behavioral traits, we used principal axis factoring to examine the structure of our data and whether new subscales could better reflect the specific components of bullying and behavioral traits most affected by the CSC program. Our findings showed support for the effectiveness of the CSC program in reducing subtypes of bullying and victimization for sixth graders (overall and relational bullying and nonphysical victimization) and seventh graders (overall, physical, nonphysical, and relational bullying and victimization), with corresponding effects on emotional dysregulation in sixth graders and reactive aggression in seventh graders. We received partial support of the effectiveness of the CSC program for several other bullying and victimization subtypes. Factor analysis revealed a distinction between two types of physical bullying, resulting in a general aggression factor and an intentional abuse of power factor, as well as between two types of relational victimization, resulting in an active relational victimization factor and a passive relational victimization factor. Our findings showed support for the effectiveness of the CSC program and the importance of implementing a thorough, long-lasting program that incorporates many program components supported by previous research. |
|
| Thu 7/31/14 10:30 am | Volen 201 |
| Thesis Seminar (Graduate Program in Psychology) |
| Amanda Lash (Memory & Cognition Lab) |
| Spoken Word Recognition: A Window into the Aging Brain and Ear |
With the growing population of older adults in our society, there is a need to understand the cognitive changes and hearing impairments that often accompany adult aging. This is especially important, since both cognitive and perceptual factors are necessary for spoken communication. This dissertation contains a series of experiments designed to identify the factors underlying spoken word recognition in older adults. In three experiments, we examine the interactive and compensatory relationship of bottom-up sensory processing and top-down contextual factors as spoken words unfold in time. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of age and hearing acuity on word recognition across different degrees of constraining linguistic contexts and the potential competition from lexical alternatives that also fit the sentential context. Experiment 1 found that constraining linguistic contexts mitigated the negative effect of age and hearing loss on word recognition; however older adults' word recognition performance was influenced by the number and probability of lexical competitors that fit the semantic context. In addition to the effects of facilitative contexts, Experiment 2 examined individual differences in spoken word recognition and the use of bottom-up/top-down processing when linguistic contexts were misleading to listeners' expectations. Experiment 2 revealed that hearing acuity, inhibition, and age predicted spoken word recognition when linguistic contexts were misleading. Moreover, it was found that older adults with poor hearing acuity were more likely than older adults with good hearing to use top-down contextual information to bias their responses when identifying words even though it did not match the bottom-up sensory information presented. Experiment 3 took a different approach to account for hearing acuity differences in order to study age effects on word recognition without the presence of a linguistic context. Experiment 3 demonstrated the surprising finding that incrementally increasing the onset durations of spoken words until they were correctly recognized was less effective for recognition than presenting words in single presentations with that same onset duration. The size of this effect was found to be predicted by working memory span. Taken together, the results from this dissertation not only inform our understanding of adult aging, but also can influence the development of potential strategies for improving spoken communication in older adults. |
|
| Thu 7/31/14 1 pm | Shapiro Science Center Atrium |
| Poster Session |
| Undergraduate Researchers (Division of Science) |
| Brandeis Summer SciFest 2014 |
| Undergraduate students from across the Division of Science, including summer visitors and Brandeis students, will present posters on their research. To present, register at www.bio.brandeis.edu/scifest |
|
| Fri 8/1/14 12 noon | Gerstenzang 121 |
| Life Sciences Summer Seminar Series |
| Jen Beierlein (Petsko-Ringe Lab) |
| Protein structure and enzyme mechanisms |
| Kate Koles (Rodal Lab) |
| Genome engineering in Drosophila melanogaster using CRISPR |
| Hosted by Brandeis University Postdoc Association |
|
| Fri 8/8/14 12 noon | Gerstenzang 121 |
| Life Sciences Summer Seminar Series |
| TBA |
| Hosted by Brandeis University Postdoc Association |
|
| Thu 8/14/14 4 pm | Abelson 229 |
| MRSEC Seminar |
| Yaouen Fily (Brandeis University) |
| TBA |
| Hosted by M. Hagan |
|
| Fri 8/15/14 12 noon | Gerstenzang 121 |
| Life Sciences Summer Seminar Series |
| Ming-Feng Tsai (Chris Miller Lab) |
| Structure and Mechanism of Ion Channels and Transporters |
| Lisa Payne (Sekuler Lab) |
| The importance of ignoring: Alpha oscillations protect selectivity |
| Hosted by Brandeis University Postdoc Association |
|
| Tue 8/19/14 2 pm | Bassine 208 |
| Special Seminar |
| Scott Lujan (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) |
| Replication Infidelity Causes Mutational Heterogeneity Across the Yeast Genome |
| Hosted by Jim Haber |
|
| Fri 8/22/14 12 noon | Gerstenzang 121 |
| Life Sciences Summer Seminar Series |
| TBA |
| Hosted by Brandeis University Postdoc Association |
|
Science at Brandeis