2023
Oct. 2, 2023: Jiwon presents her poster “Characterization of striatal dopamine signals related to pupillary response and other internal state metrics in monkeys” at the ASAP CRN Meeting in London, England.
Aug. 9, 2023: Shreya Mahajan joins the lab as a Bioengineering Ph.D. candidate.
Aug. 19, 2023: Paper titled Scalable, flexible carbon fiber electrode thread arrays for three-dimensional probing of neurochemical activity in deep brain structures of rodents accepted in Biosensors and Bioelectronics, led by former students, May Xia and Busra Agca.
May 12, 2023: Last day in the lab for Stephanie Hills. We wish her the best in her next journey.
May 8, 2023: Rebecca (Becca) Marflak joins the lab as a Research Technician / Lab Manager.
March 2, 2023: Very thrilled and honored to have hosted Dr. Katalin Gothard from University of Arizona for Pitt’s Bioengineering Seminar. She gave a very impressive talk on, "A context-dependent switch from sensing to feeling in the primate amygdala".
2022
Dec. 9, 2022: Helen shared her research at the NHPgh (NHP community across Pitt and CMU) meeting.
Nov. 28, 2022: Helen was invited to give a talk at the Neurosciences Seminar Series at UCSD, hosted by graduate student Chiaki Santiago. Chiaki interviewed Helen on her Stories of WIN (Women in Neuroscience) podcast to share her research journey
Nov. 11, 2022: Jiwon and Usamma present their poster on intertrial dopamine dynamics at the Society for Neuroscience 2022 in San Diego, CA
Oct. 17, 2022: Colum Murphy joins the lab as a Research Engineer.
Oct. 8, 2022: Lab outing to Pittsburgh’s Festival of Combustion.
Aug. 17, 2022: Mrunal Zambre joins the lab as a rotating CNUP Ph.D. candidate.
Aug. 4, 2022: Nikol Keren and Shahar Zukerman join the lab as visiting interns for the Fall semester from Ort Braude (Israel).
April 28, 2022: Helen was invited to give a talk at Carnegie Mellon University, Neuroscience Institute Seminar, hosted by Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham.
April 4, 2022: Helen, led by Team Strick, attends annual ASAP CRN Meeting in Bahamas to meet with many research leaders and experts in Parkinson’s disease from across the world.
March 30, 2022: Usamma Amjad awarded prestigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, featured in Pitt News.
March 3, 2022: Very honored and happy to host Dr. Bruno Averbeck visiting from NIH/NIMH for Pitt’s Bioengineering Graduate Seminar series. Dr. Averbeck gave an exciting talk on his lab’s work on “Computational Mechanisms and Neural Systems Underlying Reinforcement Learning”.
Jan. 28, 2022: Helen gave a talk on “Multi-modal interfaces for probing chemical and electrical neural activity long-term,” at University of Texas, El Paso, hosted by Dr. Alexander Friedman.
2021
Nov. 29, 2021: Stephanie Hills joins the lab as a Research Technician / Lab Manager.
Aug. 31, 2021: Led by Peter Strick, along with Robert Turner, Bill Stauffer, Scott Grafton (UCSB), our team was selected for the generous ASAP Award from the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) to better understand the brain circuits involved in paradoxical kinesia and their relevance to Parkinson’s disease. News was featured on NPR (interview with Jon Hamilton) and Pitt newsroom.
Aug. 9, 2021: My first two students, Usamma Amjad and Jiwon Choi, join the lab and start their journeys toward a Ph.D.
March 23, 2021: Helen was invited to give a talk on “Chronic recording of chemical and electrical neural activity in rodents and primates,” at the Northeast Biomedical Engineering Conference (NEBEC) hosted by Dr. Neeraj Gandhi.
Jan. 1, 2021: Lab begins operations at University of Pittsburgh.
2020
Sept. 25, 2020: Journal paper on relationship between dopamine and beta-band oscillation neural signals and link to critical mood and motor behaviors finally published. Results made possible by our team working in the labs of Dr. Graybiel and Dr. Cima at MIT. A summary is featured in MIT McGovern News and MIT News, made by Jennifer Michalowski and Julie Pryor.