Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition Ends with Awards to 6 Teams
Top row: Ann-Sophie Barwich, Wilma Bainbridge, Kurt Fraser, Nicole Ferrara, Jonathan Fadok.2nd row: Farzaneh Najafi, Longzhi Tan, Masashi Tabuchi, Marcelo Mattar. 3rd row: Matthew Lovett-Barron, Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz, Ritchie Chen, Anita Disney, Monsheel Sodhi.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, and the Walder Foundation have made awards to six multidisciplinary teams of early career scientists in the third and final year of the Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition initiative.
The 16 individual awards of $50,000 in direct costs to each team member will go to 14 researchers from a variety of institutions in the United States. (Two researchers who are members of more than one funded team will receive two awards.)
Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog format supports research by stimulating intensive interdisciplinary conversation and community building around a scientific theme of global importance.
The final meeting held October 24-27, 2024, in Tucson, Arizona, brought together 50 early career scientists from disciplines including neurobiology, engineering, computer science, neuroscience, and related cognitive sciences to network and brainstorm ideas for novel research to advance fundamental understanding of how memory, thought, perception and cognition work in brains at the molecular and system levels. Teams of two or three Fellows who had not previously collaborated wrote and pitched proposals for seed funding for innovative projects they developed at the conference.
At the conference, RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer said themes for Scialog initiatives are chosen “by listening to scientists, by listening to other foundations, and listening to people who have ideas of challenges that would benefit from bringing together people from different disciplines, different methodologies, and different types of institutions.”
“We want science to be broadly engaged in by people who can all contribute to these important problems -- from research universities and undergraduate colleges and from more comprehensive institutions across the United States and Canada -- and we work with other foundations to make this a reality,” he said.
He encouraged participants to enjoy talking science and to come up with “exciting new ideas that might be crazy, might fall on their face, but might launch science -- and you -- in interesting new directions.”
Keynote speaker Adina Roskies, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara, set the stage for discussions by suggesting strategies for constructing better scientific theories in her talk, “On a Correct Scientific Ontology for Cognition.”
She discussed her work in both neuroscience and philosophy, highlighting the challenges in mapping brain activity to cognitive functions using functional MRI. She suggested using deep artificial neural networks as a tool for ontological exploration and generation of hypotheses and discussed the limitations of large language models, urging Scialog participants to make the most of interactions with other researchers from other fields.
“Interacting with others who have different perspectives, theories, and backgrounds is not only a fruitful but also a really enjoyable way to do this,” she said. “It’s a different way of changing and augmenting your cognitive scheme, your conceptual scheme, or your cognitive ontology.”
In addition to Roskies, other senior scientists guiding discussions at the meeting as Facilitators were Adam Cohen, Harvard University; Jacqueline Gottlieb, Columbia University; Martin Gruebele, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Jacob Hooker, Massachusetts General Hospital; Kenneth Kosik, University of California, Santa Barbara; Marina Picciotto, Yale University; and Mani Ramaswami, Trinity College Dublin.
The meeting included brief presentations by last year’s awardees, who reported on their teams’ progress and challenges.
Daniel Burnston, Tulane University, said that a year after receiving funding, his team project with Wilma Bainbridge, University of Chicago, and Bob Wilson, University of Arizona, had produced some initial data and some initial modeling results but more significantly has opened new questions and new possibilities for future research. “There are like a thousand future directions to go from here,” he said.
Michael Economo, Boston University, said his project with Yao Chen, Washington University in Saint Louis, combined “a lot of tools and expertise in a technically complex project.” He said they have made considerable progress toward their initial scientific goals, but more broadly, the project has been "very helpful in allowing us both to do better and more interesting science and expand in new ways.”
More than 80 individual Fellows participated in meetings throughout the three-year course of the initiative, finding inspiration and expanding their research horizons.
2022 awardee Patrese Robinson-Drummer, Haverford College, said the shared research interests and instant connection she made with co-awardees Sydney Trask, Purdue University, and Allison Mackey, University of Pennsylvania, have led to significant findings and ongoing collaboration.
Their team project examining the impact of early life stress on cognitive aging and mental health disorders like dementia and Alzheimer's has produced intriguing results, allowing Robinson-Drummer to recently submit an NIH R15 area grant funding proposal (specifically for small liberal arts colleges or undergraduate-only colleges) building on their collaboration.
“When we met for the first time at Scialog, we knew right away this was going to be an amazing partnership,” she said. “With the three of us doing this kind of lifespan perspective, and we've only just started, we're going to be together forever.”
Elizabeth McNeill, Iowa State University, said she was initially a Drosophila biologist but thanks to conversations with colleagues at Scialog, she became open to – and confident about -- expanding her research focus by applying her expertise to humans and rats. The award she received in the second year of the initiative to explore the roots of alcohol dependency with Phillip Rivera, Macalester College, and Alison Weiss, Oregon Health & Science University, allowed her to fully transition into a new direction bridging biomarker studies in human samples with mechanistic studies in genetic models.
“Now my lab does all sorts of different profiling in different model organisms and in humans,” she said.
She noted the significance of Scialog to her career, saying it provided a space to gather ideas to clarify a professional identity and future direction, and a niche for herself that would not duplicate the work of peers with similar backgrounds and training.
Fellow Debra Karhson, University of New Orleans, said Scialog’s unique “salon-type” format allows for unstructured discussions, fostering a sense of wonder and curiosity that is essential for early career scientists.
“Scialog really helped me transition from thinking like a postdoc to thinking like a PI, because it gave me the space to ask big, broad questions, and it gave me the resources and people to facilitate that,” she said. “Having somebody come out of left field and tell you something that you've never heard about really gets you back to the place that we all started at in our Ph.D., where you have so many fierce wonders. Allowing your mind to wander and to ask what has not been asked -- that’s where we should take a closer look.”
The following Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition teams will receive 2024 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards:
Ann-Sophie Barwich, History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine / Cognitive Science, Indiana University Bloomington
Wilma Bainbridge, Psychology, University of Chicago
A Presence of Departed Acts: Understanding Multisensory Interference and Working Memory Capacity with Focus on Olfactory Interactions
Kurt Fraser, Psychology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Nicole Ferrara, Physiology and Biophysics, Rosalind Franklin University
Jonathan Fadok, Psychology, Tulane University
The (Im)Mutability of Emotional-Motivational Modularity: Neurofeedback for the Reorganization of Valence
Farzaneh Najafi, Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology
Longzhi Tan, Neurobiology, Stanford University
Masashi Tabuchi, Neurosciences, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Rewiring Genome in 3D to Enhance Cognition after Sleep Deprivation across Species
Marcelo Mattar, Psychology, New York University
Matthew Lovett-Barron, Neurobiology, University of California, San Diego
Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz, Neurobiology & Behavior, Cornell University
Understanding the Neural Basis of Natural Behavior with Individualized RNNs
Farzaneh Najafi, Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology
Ritchie Chen, Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco
Anita Disney, Neurobiology, Duke University
From Spikes to Neuromodulation: Uncertainty Coding in Rodents and Primates
Monsheel Sodhi, Molecular Pharmacology and Neuroscience, Loyola University
Longzhi Tan, Neurobiology, Stanford University
Unraveling Epigenomic & Epitranscriptomic Mechanisms of Prenatal Stress: Sex Differences in Social Deficits across Generations
