Research Forum Awards - During the Inaugural Institute for Neurocognitive Science & Technology Research Forum Thursday, three MSU students were awarded for their outstanding research. Nan Wang, a Computer Science student, was awarded the Outstanding Ph.D.-level Research Award, Jose Pvillalta, an Electrical and Computer Engineering student, was awarded the Outstanding Masters-level Research Award, and Stephen Edwards, a Psychology student, was awarded the Outstanding Undergraduate-level Research Award. There were 22 submissions from five departments in three colleges.

Strategy Use by the Aging Brain: Age Differences in Activation as Measured by fMRI. STEPHEN EDWARDS. Associative learning refers to the process of linking two separate items or events into a single memory that includes both. Older adults have been shown to have more difficulty in performing this task, a phenomenon known as the associative learning deficit (Kausler, 1994; Hertzog & Dunlosky, 2004; Naveh-Benjamin, 2001). However, the deficit does not appear to result from an inability to use various strategies to encode the two items. Older adults appear able to use strategies, such as imagery or sentence generation, to form effective mediators. However, the effectiveness of such strategies on memory performance does vary with age; cued-recall performance is typically worse for older adults. The present experiment used event-related fMRI imaging techniques to determine whether differential regional patterns of brain activation were obtained when people reported using interactive imagery versus sentence generation as encoding strategies. If younger and older adults use similar brain regions at encoding, perhaps age differences are due to difficulties at retrieval. Alternatively, the pattern of activation may be more diffuse for older adults, due to compensation or dedifferentiation. Both behavioral and preliminary imaging findings will be presented. Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Deborah K. Eakin.

Implantable Antennas for Wireless Data Telemetry. JOSE PVILLALTA. In the medical field, wireless technology is being researched for various medical applications. The most prominent application is medical telemetry. This technology will not only bring great benefits to patients as complete mobility and comfort, but will also demonstrate a higher level of patient care by monitoring the patients vitals over a distance via radio-frequency technology. An inhuman medical system (implantable devices) brings up some rigorous challenges. Some of the issues involved in-body systems are heating of the surrounding tissue, compatibility materials with the body’s physiology, and the power consumption it takes to operate the implantable device. An implantable antenna must satisfy stringent size and weight constraints while consecutively achieving the proper band and radiating characteristics. The design must radiate outside the body affectivily and efficiently while complying to the radiation requirements with the power associated to drive the device. In this study, we consider several microstrip antennas designed for the 402-405 MHz Medical Implant Communications Service band. Results regarding the antennas characteristics: return loss, gain, near and far fields will be presented for a variety of antennas. The purpose of this study is to design a miniaturized implantable antenna for wireless data telemetry. Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Erdem Topsakal.

A Proteogenomic Mapping Pipeline for Structural Annotation of Genomes. NAN WANG. Proteogenomic mapping is the process of using proteomics data to structurally annotate a genome. Structural annotation of genomes is determined by computational pipelines. It is well-known that these computational methods identify make mistakes. Proteomic data can used to confirm the identification of genes identified by computational methods and correct mistakes. A proteo-genomics pipeline has been developed that uses peptides identified from mass spectrometry for structural annotation of genomes. Spectra are matched against both a protein database and the genome translated in all six reading frames. Those peptides that match the genome but not the protein database potentially represent novel ORFs, annotation errors, or splice variants. These short experimentally derived peptides are used to generate Expressed Protein Sequence Tags (ePSTs) by aligning the peptides to the genomic DNA and extending the translation in the 3’ and 5’ direction until an in-frame stop is encountered. The ePSTs are manually inspected for orthologs and homologs in the nucleotide databases, known domain structures and sequences indicative of exon/intron boundaries. We plan to enhance the pipeline to collect and evaluate evidence from a number of sources for the use of ePSTs to identify novel ORFs and to correct different types of annotation errors. Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Susan Bridges. Other Faculty: Dr. Fiona McCarthy, Dr. Shane Burgess, Dr. Bindumadhavi Nanduri, and Dr. Mark Lawrence.

2006 INST Research Forum Photos