2019 News

Below is the news from the pNEURO Lab from 2019.

June, 2019

Two lab members graduated! Micah Levy graduated with his BS in Neuroscience with honors and Manorama Kadwani graduated with her MS in Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Bruns was officially notified of receiving tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor!
Three lab conference proceedings from the March IEEE NER conference were posted online as publications. A study led by PhD student Aileen Ouyang to perform awake, behaving neuromodulation. A study led by PhD student Ahmad Jiman, with collaborators, to investigate the effect of high frequency stimulation on renal nerves to the kidney. And, a collaboration led by EECS to develop microneedles for small nerves.
Zach Sperry was a co-leader of a Biointerfaces Institute student Bio Hack-a-thon, which brainstormed solutions for aging challenges. A summary of the fun activity was posted to engrXiv.
Another lab preprint was posted to bioRxiv. This in vivo study led by Neuroscience BS student Micah Levy investigated the rat vaginal microbiome and the effects of nerve stimulation. We had collaborations with Internal Medicine, Psychology, and Obstetrics & Gynecology.

PhD student Elizabeth Bottorff was recognized with an Honorable Mention for her Graduate Research Fellowship application to the National Science Foundation.
Lab manager Eric Kennedy was awarded the BME Staff Award, from the U-M Medical School Endowment for the Basic Sciences.

A lab collaboration developing a direct-bladder interface was posted to bioRxiv as a paper preprint. Led by EECS, PhD student Lauren Zimmerman and former BS, MS student Chris Stephan are co-authors. This paper demonstrates a stretchable substrate that can deliver current to contract the bladder directly. It was funded by the NIH NIBIB.
A paper led by PhD student Aileen Ouyang was published at IEEE TNSRE. In this work she showed that real-time decoding of bladder pressure is possible, and that this decoding can be used for closed-loop neuromodulation. This study was supported by several grants from the NIH.

We attended the IEEE Neural Engineering conference in San Francisco. Dr. Bruns gave a workshop talk on the first day and plenary talk on the last day. PhD students Aileen Ouyang and Ahmad Jiman presented posters. We had a good U-M neural engineering group in attendance.

The Biointerfaces Institute held a Research Day. Dr. Bruns was awarded as the BI Faculty Innovator! He was at the IEEE conference, so Zach Sperry and Lauren Zimmerman gave a research talk on his behalf. Elizabeth Bottorff, Manorama Kadwani, and Hannah Parrish presented micro-posters. Zach was also an MC for the day, in his role leading the Biointerfaces Institute student group BIONIC (Biointerfaces Interlaboratory Committees).

Dr. Bruns was a co-author on a modeling paper published with BME collaborator Scott Lempka and Bobby Graham, in Clinical Neurophysiology., which showed that stimulation of dorsal root ganglia for pain likely activates myelinated fibers, not C-fibers.