2015 News

Below is all the news out of the pNEURO lab from 2015.

November, 2015

Our lab was joined with three other research groups across campus, in getting funded by the University of Michigan MCubed program. We are looking forward to some exciting results in this novel proposal.

Dr. Bruns attended the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Fall Meeting, in Tampa, Florida. Anastasia Ostrowski, Indie Rice, and Chris Stephan also attended and did great jobs at presenting their posters.
The lab was well represented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference in Chicago, Illinois. Abeer Khurram, Shani Ross, and Zach Sperry all had active poster sessions, with support from co-authors Ahmad Jiman and Colin Mahar.
There was also plenty of time for lab activities outside the conference, with poster authors also joined by Lauren Zimmerman and Seth Ringel.

At the annual BME Graduate Student retreat, Zach Sperry was recognized with the first Derek Tat Memorial Award for First-Year PhD Student Excellence.
Our lab was thrilled to receive official notification that we were one of 12 U18 projects funded by the new NIH Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program. The goal of our project, in collaboration with EECS colleagues Euisik Yoon and John Seymour, is to develop a novel electrode interface for exploring bladder neural control. In the table below, from the SPARC website, our project is the black box in the upper left.

The lab is honored to be among the eleven university projects awarded with a grant from the MiBrain Initiative, for Seed Funding for Innovative Projects in Neuroscience. The MiBrain Initiative is described in this University Record article, and all funded projects are listed on this webpage.
Congrats to Zach Sperry for being accepted into the university’s Translational Research Education Certificate (TREC) program. Also, Indie Rice was notified that her abstract was accepted for the Undergraduate Research track at the Biomedical Engineering Society conference in October.
The lab, joined by two EECS colleagues, had a blast paintballing at Futureball north of Ann Arbor. It was a great teambuilding event that we look forward to repeating.

Dr. Bruns and the lab were thrilled to start work on the 2nd and 3rd grant-supported projects in the lab. An NIH NIBIB R21 and a Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research pilot grantboth started this month.
Anastasia Ostrowski and Chris Stephan were notified that their Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference abstracts were accepted for posters for the October meeting. Dr. Bruns will be a neural interfaces platform session co-chair at the meeting.
Kaile Bennett was notified that her abstract to the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS) conferencein November was accepted for a poster.
And, in the last week of July, Dr. Bruns was notified that two more grants that may be starting soon!

Abeer Khurram, Shani Ross, and Zach Sperry all were notified that their Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference abstracts were accepted for posters at the October meeting.

Congratulations to Ahmad Jiman and Abeer Khurram for graduating with their Master’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering. Below are some pictures from Ahmad’s time at graduation festivities.

Also congratulations to Indie Rice and Chris Stephan for receiving SURE fellowships to perform undergraduate research in the lab for the summer.

Dr. Bruns and Shani are featured in a picture collage about the Biointerfaces Institute, as part of the NCRC 2014 Annual Report.

Congratulations to Abeer Khurram for being awarded a Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant.

The lab is excited to start work on its first externally funded project. We are thankful to the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation for providing support.