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Hi Reddit! I’m Olivier George, principal investigator at The Scripps Research Institute and member of the Committee On The Neurobiology Of Addictive Disorders here. My lab recently published a novel study in The Journal of Neuroscience identifying a neuronal network that may be critical for alcoholism. This preclinical study demonstrates that the behaviors associated with alcohol dependence may be reversed by performing a single pharmacogenetic intervention in the brain. The results of this study show that in rats that were heavily dependent on alcohol, both the compulsive alcohol drinking and the physical signs of withdrawal could be reversed back to normal by inactivating a specific neuronal ensemble in a brain region called the central nucleus of the amygdala. A key result in this study is the very long-lasting reversal of alcohol dependence (> 2 weeks) after a single brain manipulation, suggesting that we could use this neuronal network to identify new molecular targets and better medications for the treatment of alcoholism. Our lab is currently working on identifying the brain regions under the control of this neuronal network and on identifying new molecular targets in this network that could be used for medication development. Curious about how addiction works and how alcohol and drugs affect our neural networks? You can also follow our lab on Twitter Read the press release on our research here ** I will be answering your questions at 5pm EST (2pm PST) – Ask Me Anything!**

Hi Reddit, We’re a team of scientists at the University of Marburg: Department of Medical Psychology which specializes in Chronic Pain. Our research is focused on making people pain free again. We have developed SET, a treatment that combines a medical device with behavioral therapy. Our research shows that patients are different - heterogeneous - and that chronic pain (pain lasting over three months without a clear medical reason) patients typically have a depreciated autonomic nervous system (ANS). More importantly, the ANS can be trained using a combination of individualized cardiac-gated electro stimulation administered through the finger and operant therapy focused on rewarding good behaviors and eliminating pain behaviors. With the SET training, a large percentage of our patients become pain free. Although most of our research has been focused on Fibromyalgia, it is also applicable to other chronic pain conditions. See more information I’m Prof. Dr. Kati Thieme, a full professor at the University of Marburg in the Medical School, Department of Medicinal Psychology. If you suffer from chronic pain, or would somehow like to get involved and would like to help us out, please fill out this short survey. It only takes a few minutes, and would be a great help! Thanks! Answering your questions today will be: Prof. Dr. Kati Thieme, PhD - Department Head, founding Scientist, Psychotherapist Johanna Berwanger, MA - Psychologist Ulrika Evermann, MA - Psychologist Robert Malinowski, MA - Physicist Dr. jur. Marc Mathys - Scientist Tina Meller, MA - Psychologist We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

Hi Reddit, My name is Scott Hensley and I am an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. My research focuses on how our immune systems try to stop pathogens and how pathogens fight back. At our lab, we are particularly interested in figuring out how viruses evade antibody responses. We recently published a study titled ‘Antibodies with Original Antigenic Sin Properties Are Valuable Components of Secondary Immune Responses to Influenza Viruses’ in PLOS Pathogens. In this study, we used a mouse model to show that antibodies stimulated by past influenza virus infections can help fight against new antigenically distinct influenza viruses, despite binding poorly to these new viruses. We propose that these antibodies, classically termed ‘original antigenic sin’ antibodies, are an important component of secondary immune responses against influenza viruses. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything! Don’t forget to follow our lab on Twitter @SCOTTeHENSLEY.

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We are Paul Nuyujukian MD PhD (Postdoc, soon to be Bioengineering faculty at Stanford) and Jonathan Kao PhD (Postdoc, soon to be Electrical Engineering faculty at UCLA), neuroengineers in the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Systems Laboratory, which is directed by Professor Krishna Shenoy PhD. We just published a paper in the Proceedings of IEEE in which we demonstrated a high-performance neural prosthesis where monkeys transmitted text one character at a time at a rate of up to 12 words per minute. Video of monkey typing Before we get ahead of ourselves, let us assure you that monkeys don’t understand English. In the video above, the monkeys only saw the green and yellow dots, and not the black letters (which were added afterwards in post-production as a visual aid). The game engine prompted the green targets in a specific sequence that if the monkeys got correct, would spell out words and sentences that we can all understand. The video above was a selection from Hamlet, but the primary data of the paper were articles from the New York Times that the monkeys were asked to “transcribe.” All they are doing though is navigating the white cursor to the green target at every trial, and earning a liquid reward for each success. The ability of the monkeys to control the cursor with their brain was accomplished via a brain-machine interface (BMI). BMIs are systems that record from the brain and translate these measurements to useful control signals, which could be used to control a robotic limb, wheelchair, or, as was in this case, a computer cursor. In this case, the BMI has similar functionality as a one-button computer mouse: it can move in two dimensions and click. The hardware interfaces used in the BMI, neural electrodes (the one we used was the Utah mulitelectrode array), are not new. They have been around for decades. What is new are the algorithms that translate (or, as we refer to them, “decode”) the brain signals into movement of the cursor. The machine learning decoding algorithms used in this study were ones that we developed recently (cursor movement and click decoders) that significantly improve the performance of communication BMIs, enabling our monkeys to achieve rates that are 2-3 times faster than rates achievable with prior algorithms. There is tons more we could write about (algorithm details, clinical trials that these findings have resulted in, what other medical conditions BMIs may help with, etc), but we’ll stop here and open it up to you all for questions. We look forward to answering as many of your questions as possible! 2PM PT - We are live! 6PM PT - We are done, thank you for the great questions! More videos: Dwell typing Click typing Media coverage: Stanford press release IEEE Spectrum NPR KQED - Future of You The Verge Wired UK

Hi, my name is Paul Helquist, Professor and Associate Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry, at the University of Notre Dame. I was a native of Northern Minnesota where I grew up literally in the “sticks” on a small lake surrounded by woods somewhere north of Duluth on the way to the Canadian border. I attended school in a small town of 2,000 people 15 miles away from our home and was the stereotypical example of the first member of our extended family to attend college. I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in 1965 on a free-ride scholarship, which paid for my full tuition, which was all of $400 per year in those days. I had the common problem of deciding upon a major and a career. I kept wavering back and forth among physics, astronomy, medicine, and dentistry but not yet chemistry. I initially opted for physics, but in the midst of taking some chemistry courses as required for physics majors, I was working on lab course experiments one day when a brand new, gung-ho assistant professor, Bob Carlson, came into the lab and said “Follow me.” I was a little taken aback, but he took me, greatly bewildered, to his very small two-person research lab and said “This is where you’re going to work” as a substitute for taking that lab course. That was a very fateful event. It was a synthetic organic chemistry lab. I quickly fell in love with the research, changed my major to chemistry, and was very fortunate to be able to publish two journal articles with Bob Carlson. My odyssey in synthetic organic chemistry continued at Cornell where I earned my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in a little over three years under the direction of another young, super enthusiastic assistant professor, Martin Semmelhack, and at Harvard where I did postdoctoral research for a year and a half with Nobel Laureate E. J. Corey. I was then set to begin my own career at age 27, but I had tremendous difficulty making a decision about which of the positions to accept that had been offered to me at a pharmaceutical company, chemical companies, or universities. Well here I am now, after choosing the academic route and having been a faculty member for 42 years. In 1974, I began as an assistant professor at SUNY Stony, and in 1984, I was recruited to Notre Dame when it was entering a period of tremendous investment and growth in graduate and research programs. This career path has led to living and working in several places, including Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, and even in Sweden and Denmark, where I have held a number of visiting positions. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in organic chemistry and run a research group, which has generated over 180 publications and patents in the following areas: development of new synthetic methods; design and development of transition metal reagents and catalysts for selective synthetic reactions; total synthesis of natural products synthesis; and applications to new pharmaceuticals, including antibacterial and antitumor agents and treatments for rare inherited diseases as part of an international network of collaborators in the U.S.A., Europe, and Asia. A therapeutic agent developed in my lab is currently being used in an FDA-approved human clinical trial. I have also served in many university administrative and service positions, as Chair of the Chemistry Board of Examiners for the Graduate Records Examination at the Educational Testing Service, as the Director of the National Science Foundation Workshop for College Teachers of Organic Chemistry, as a regional and national leader in the Siemens Math, Science, and Technology Competition, as a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and head of an Indiana state-wide program for clinical translational research at Indiana University, Purdue, and Notre Dame. Since 1981, I have offered special courses on advanced synthetic organic chemistry on over 140 occasions at sites throughout the U.S.A., Canada, and Europe under the auspices of the American Chemical Society and several other sponsors. My present ACS course, “Organic Synthesis: Methods and Strategies for the 21st Century Chemist,” emphasizes the latest developments in this field and is next scheduled for this coming November 7-8 in San Francisco followed by several offerings in 2017. I am very enthusiastic about answering as many questions as time permits about any of the aspects of the career area in which I have spent the last half century. I will be back at 11:00 a.m. EDT to answer your questions! I am now on line until noon EDT. I will be off line until later in the afternoon after I finish heading a faculty meeting and a few other duties. I am back again (2:00 pm EDT). I will mix the rest of the afternoon with meeting in my office with my research students and with responding to your Reddit questions. OK, I have run out to time for today at 4:45 pm EDT. I greatly appreciate the huge number of questions and responses, including ones that were in direct contrast with mine. That is what makes for a good chat room.

Hi Reddit! I’m Dr. Teresa Woodruff from Northwestern University here to answer any questions you may have about ovarian biology, oncofertility, and the importance of sex and gender inclusion in the biomedical sciences. In 2006, I coined the term “oncofertility” to describe the merging of two fields: oncology and fertility. When we started this work, young men were able to bank sperm before a potentially sterilizing cancer treatment but women, with the same hope for survival, were not provide options. Now we have options and babies born to men and women who have survived their disease. This work was fostered by my interest in ovarian biology. Men make sperm constantly – about 1,500 sperm with every heartbeat. By contrast, women are born with all the oocytes that we will ever have – about 1 million in our ovaries. My lab is interested in how the ovarian reserve, this million follicle pool (a follicle is a single egg surrounded by cells that produce hormones like estrogen and support egg maturation) is metered out from birth until menopause – 6 decades to wait for activation. We began growing individual ovarian follicles in our lab to unravel some of this fundamental biology and developed strategies that are helping cancer patients who want to protect their fertility. Finally, I’m interested in educating scientists about the value of including both males and females in their studies. For a lot of good reasons, many labs study only one sex. But the outcomes from single sex experiments cannot always be translated to the opposite sex. So we have been working to ensure that we all think about sex as a biological variable from bench to bedside. I will be back at 2 pm ET to answer your questions, ask me anything! Here are some resources for more information: Women’s Health Research Institute Oncofertility Consortium Repropedia Introduction to Reproduction on Coursera EDIT: Thank you for all of your questions! I will be heading out now but may check back in if there are any follow up questions!

Hello reddit! I’m Cathy Spong, and I oversee NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which supports research on fetal, infant and child development; maternal, child and family health; reproductive biology and population issues; and medical rehabilitation. We know that Zika virus causes microcephaly and other serious birth defects, and is linked to pregnancy problems, including miscarriage and stillbirth. While our attention is rightly focused on vaccine development, mosquito control, and other measures to prevent the spread of Zika, it is also important to acknowledge that people affected by Zika today—parents, families, caregivers, and health care professionals—may be contending with unknown health outcomes for many years to come. We in the public health community need to identify optimal approaches to treat and care for children who have been exposed to Zika virus in the womb. We also need to be able to tell a woman and tell a family, the risks Zika virus poses throughout pregnancy, and research will help us understand these risks. Earlier this summer, NIH launched the multi-country Zika in Infants and Pregnancy (ZIP) study to evaluate the health risks that Zika virus infection poses to pregnant women and their developing fetuses and infants. Researchers aim to enroll 10,000 pregnant women in their first trimester and follow them throughout their pregnancies. After birth, the infants will be followed for at least one year. We anticipate that studies like ZIP will provide important information on the link between Zika infection and pregnancy complications and inform strategies to help safeguard the health of mothers and their newborns. I emphasized the need for this type of research in a recent Huffington Post blog, and NIH is hosting an open workshop on September 22-23, 2016, to find the best approaches to treat and care for children exposed to Zika in the womb. I will be answering questions starting at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT). Ask Me Anything! Edit: Hi, everyone! That wraps our chat up for today. Thank you for your questions – this was a great opportunity to discuss Zika virus and the need to study its long-term effects on pregnancy and children. Don’t forget, we’re hosting our scientific workshop on Zika on September 22 & 23. You can register to attend here. We will be closing this AMA thread, but if you have follow-up questions, please send us a Facebook message or tweet at us.

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Hi Reddit, My name is Raina Plowright and I am an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Montana State University. I use field, lab and modeling approaches to understand how pathogens persist in wildlife populations (especially bats) and spill over to humans. And my name is Olivier Restif and I’m a Lecturer in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. I use mathematical models to track the spread of microbes within their hosts and across populations. In particular, I’m trying to find out how the ecology of African bats may contribute to their ability to spread viruses. We recently published a paper titled “Transmission or within-host processes driving pulses of infection in reservoir hosts” in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. We examine the dynamics of emerging bat infections within their reservoir host populations. We argue that understanding the mechanisms that drive pulses of excretion of viruses such as Hendra, Nipah, Ebola and Marburg viruses, is essential to predict or manage spillover risk. We outline an ambitious multidisciplinary research agenda that would allow better management or even prevention of spillover. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET (10 am PT) – Ask Us Anything! You can follow Raina on Twitter at @rainamontana and Olivier on @BugsWormsNBats.

Hello Redditors! I’m Elad Yom-Tov, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. I am a Machine Learning and Information Retrieval researcher, and for the past few years my work has focused on using Internet data to study our health. Internet data are all those things that we create while browsing the web: posts on Facebook and Twitter, queries on Google and Bing, blogs, and other content. These data can teach us about aspects of medicine that are hard to learn about in other ways. A few examples include measuring the effect of mainstream media on the development of eating disorders, estimating the effectiveness of flu vaccines, detecting new side effects of medical drugs, and discovering how visiting a dating site can lead to catching an STD. My book on these topics, Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine (MIT Press) was published earlier this year. AMA, including questions you are interested in, and perhaps we can research together! I will be back at 11 am EDT (8 am PDT) to answer your questions, AMA! Edit: Folks, thank you for your being interested in this work, and for your questions. It was a real pleasure discussing my work with you. I’ll check in later to see if there are additional questions.