Congratulations to Dr. Qinglei Meng on successfully defending his PhD thesis entitled “Non-invasive Neural Monitoring and Stimulation”.
Committee members:
Dr. Fow-Sen Choa (Chair)
Dr. Li Yan
Dr. Anthony Johnson
Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin
Dr. Yordan Kostov
Dr. Yihong Yang (NIH/NIDA)
Qinglei Meng excels in his PhD research goals of Transcranial magnetic stimulation in rat models in collaboration with NIDA
Qinglei Meng’s current research interest is the development of focal transcranial magnetic stimulator. In this project, we invented a novel stimulation system with a tightly focused TMS coil, which could deliver stimulation on an area of 2mm2 in the rodents (both mice and rats) brain. EMG signal was recorded from unilateral movements induced by the stimulation. And compared with commercial TMS, we used much lower voltage to reach the threshold of stimulations.
Related publication:
Meng Q, Jing L, Badjo JP, Du X, Hong E, Yang Y, Lu H, Choa FS. A novel transcranial magnetic stimulator for focal stimulation of rodent brain. Brain Stimulation: Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research in Neuromodulation. 2018 May 1;11(3):663-5.
Congratulations Deepa Gupta on being awarded the Best Woman Researcher Award at the UMBC ACM-IEEE CSEE Research Day!
Deepa Gupta’s research work primarily focuses on signal processing for neural cognitive conclusions from electroencephalography (EEG) activity along mentoring undergraduates and high school students. At this event, she discussed functional connectivity analysis using EEG with Kapton polyimide based microelectrode array from a C57/BL6 mouse model to auditory stimulation and found significant correlation between left motor and somatosensory cortex along high visual cortex activity in the delta wave band. Such studies can eventually open doorway to advance medicine. This is supported by our NSF grant ECCS-1631820.
Related publication:
Gupta, D., et al. “Kapton polyimide-based EEG microelectrode array and interfaces for mice brainwave recordings and analysis.” Smart Biomedical and Physiological Sensor Technology XV. Vol. 10662. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2018.
Heartiest Congratulations to our high school students, Daniel Li and Jennifer Luzhansky, for winning the following accolades at the 63rd Annual Baltimore Science Fair.
Their project studied the sensory gating effect in schizophrenia by analyzing EEG data received from our collaborators, Dr. Elliot Hong at the MPRC, under the mentorship of Dr. Fow-Sen Choa and our PhD student, Deepa Gupta.
National Science Foundation under the Neural and Cognitive Systems (NCS) program supports multidisciplinary research related to the brain and behavior.
“CSEE Professor Fow-Sen Choa, will receive nearly half a million dollars over 3 years from NSF to develop technology that will allow very targeted stimulation to be delivered to any area in the brain.” source: https://news.umbc.edu/three-umbc-faculty-studying-the-human-brain-to-offer-options-for-treatment-and-early-intervention/
Professor Fow-Sen Choa has been selected as a Fellow of SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics in account of his technical achievements and service to the general optics community and to SPIE. He was cited for achievements in the development of standoff chemical sensing using quantum cascade laser. For more information click here