Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from Czech Republic is joining our BME lab as a laureate of the NAWA academic exchange grant to decipher specific memories in the human brain 1 October 2019 – Posted in: news – Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

After a long vacation break and no BME news for August, we are now happy to announce that Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from the International Clinical Research Center (ICRC) in Brno, Czech Republic, will be joining our BME lab in Gdansk as one of the laureates of prestigious ULAM program grants from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Our proposed project was highly ranked on the seventh position out 70 awardees:

https://nawa.gov.pl/en/nawa/news/1184-final-results-of-the-call-in-the-ulam-programme

Jan will be investigating fast oscillations in the human brain as signatures of neuronal assemblies that underlie encoding of specific concepts and their memory traces. Our work on these fast oscillations, which are called ‘high-frequency oscillations’ or HFOs, comes back to our seminal publications in Brain: journal of neurology (2014 and 2017) from the postdoctoral work at Mayo Clinic. Our hypothesis is that these fast brain waves synchronize, or bind together, those neurons that underlie our thoughts and memories for individual concepts like ‘fish’, which are presented on a computer screen in the verbal tasks performed by our patients.

This exchange grant is funded for six months and will initiate building an infrastructure between our BME lab and the ICRC for shared databases of patient recordings in Poland and Czech Republic, as well as toolboxes for signal processing and data-mining based on intelligent machine-learning approaches. Such infrastructure will foster new international collaborative grants to investigate cognitive deficits and the human mind in epilepsy and neurodegenerative disorders.

Jan’s project at BME is planned to begin early in 2020. Stay tuned for more news…