Peter Christensen, an internationally recognized scholar of architectural history and design, has been named the new Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center. Christensen, who begins his tenure today, succeeds Joan Shelley Rubin, the Dexter Perkins Professor of History, who has led the center since its inception in 2015.

Christensen, a professor of art and art history, specializes in modern architectural and environmental history of Europe and the Middle East. Among his goals is “guiding the Humanities Center to a place where it can boast a truly global agenda,” he says.

“I envision several programmatic and financial forms of support that will help students and faculty expand the international and intercultural aspects of teaching and research.”

In addition, Christensen, who will serve a five-year term, plans to focus on the center’s research mission, while maintaining its engagement with local youth and environmental efforts.

“I am interested in transforming the center from a place that supports research into one that generates research,” he says. “This will entail strategic new collaborations with publishers and other media.” Learn more.

It has long been thought that when walking is combined with a task, both suffer. However, this is not always the case, according to research at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience. Some young and healthy people improve performance on cognitive tasks while walking by changing the use of neural resources. However, this does not necessarily mean you should work on a big assignment while walking off that cake from the night before.

“There was no predictor of who would fall into which category before we tested them; we initially thought that everyone would respond similarly,” says Eleni Patelaki (MS ’19), a biomedical engineering PhD student in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory. She is first author of the study in Cerebral Cortex. “It was surprising that for some of the subjects it was easier for them to do dual-tasking – do more than one task – compared to single-tasking – doing each task separately. This was interesting and unexpected because most studies in the field show that the more tasks that we have to do concurrently the lower our performance gets.”

Using a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, researchers monitored the brain activity, kinematics and behavior of 26 healthy 18- to 30-year-olds as they looked at a series of images, either while sitting on a chair or walking on a treadmill. Participants were instructed to click a button each time the image changed. If the same image appeared back-to-back participants were asked to not click.

Performance achieved by each participant in this task while sitting was considered their personal behavioral “baseline”. When walking was added to performing the same task, investigators found that different behaviors appeared, with some people performing worse than their sitting baseline – as expected based on previous studies – but also with some others improving compared to their sitting baseline. The electroencephalogram, or EEG, data showed that the 14 participants who improved at the task while walking had a change in frontal brain function which was absent in the 12 participants who did not improve. This brain activity change suggests increased flexibility or efficiency in the brain. Learn more.

Natural selection has produced mammals that age at dramatically different rates. Take, for example, the naked mole rat shown here.  It can live up to 41 years, nearly ten times as long as similar-size rodents such as mice.

What accounts for longer lifespan? According to new research from University biologists, a key piece of the puzzle lies in the mechanisms that regulate gene expression.

In a paper published in Cell Metabolism, the researchers, including Vera Gorbunova, the Doris Johns Cherry professor of biology and medicine; Andrei Seluanov, professor of biology and medicine; and Jinlong Lu, a postdoctoral research associate in Gorbunova’s lab and the first author of the paper, revealed that two regulatory systems controlling gene expression—circadian and pluripotency networks—are critical to longevity. The findings have implications both in understanding how longevity evolves and in providing new targets to combat aging and age-related diseases.

They found that long-lived species tend to have low expression of genes involved in energy metabolism and inflammation; and high expression of genes involved in DNA repair, RNA transport, and organization of cellular skeleton (or microtubules). Previous research by Gorbunova and Seluanov has shown that features such as more efficient DNA repair and a weaker inflammatory response are characteristic of mammals with long lifespans.

They found that two major systems regulate expression of these genes. The negative lifespan genes—those involved in energy metabolism and inflammation—are controlled by circadian networks. That is, their expression is limited to a particular time of day, which may help limit the overall expression of the genes in long-lived species. On the other hand, positive lifespan genes—those involved in DNA repair, RNA transport, and microtubules—are controlled by what is called the pluripotency network. The pluripotency network is involved in reprogramming somatic cells—any cells that are not reproductive cells—into embryonic cells, which can more readily rejuvenate and regenerate, by repackaging DNA that becomes disorganized as we age. Learn more.

Shraddha Shah, neuroscience, 11 a.m. July 6, 2022, Ryan Case Method Room (1-9576) Medical Center.
Linking attentional modulation to neuronal feature-selectivity in macaque V1.
Advisor: Farran Briggs

A Rochester Early Stage Investigator (RESIN) Seminar from noon to 1 p.m. via Zoom on Wednesday, July 13, will identify services and resources available at the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI) to help you conduct research—and explain how faculty, staff, and students can access services and request assistance.

The seminar will be presented by:

• Carrie Dykes, UR CTSI’s director of research services.
• Jeanne Holden-Wiltse, director of informatics and executive director of the UR CTSI Center for Leading Innovation and Collaboration.
• Edwin van Wijngaarden, professor and associate chair of public health sciences and UR CTSI’s strategic director for research education.

Register here.