The Menopause Health Engineering Initiative, founded by Prof. Nozomi Nishimura, aims to understand the science of menopause and improve health for half the population! Check out the Cornell Chronical article here.

Postdoc Becka Irwin has just accepted a position as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at the University of Rochester, to begin July 2025. Congratulations Becka!

Check out Becka's UR faculty page here.

Through a new collaboration on VR technology with the Sarvestani lab, the Schaffer-Nishimura lab marks its 7th Neurotech project funded through the Mong Fellows program in the past 9 years, beginning with the inaugural fellowship in 2016. Congratulations to all!

• 2024: Mobile VR goggles to investigate perceptual stability - Matthew Isaacson and Erin Kempkes
• 2022: Predictive detection and real-time optogenetic silencing of pathological epileptiform discharges in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease - Laura Berkowitz and Ryan Harvey
• 2021: A headset-based virtual reality system for small animal neuroscience - Matthew Isaacson and Hongyu Chang
• 2020: A microfluidic glymphatics-on-chip to decipher transport mechanisms of endogenously produced proteins in brain tissues - Chris Brunkhorst and Aria Henderson
• 2018: Measuring neural activity in freely moving Drosophila using bioluminescent calcium sensors - Daniel Rivera and Saumya Sahai
• 2017: Dissecting a novel analgesic pathway across the brain-spine axis - Yu-Ting Cheng and Yi-Yun Ho
• 2016: A barcode approach to measuring neuronal activity in the brain - Mitch Pender and Changwoo Seo

 

 

The project, led by SN-lab alumnus Seth Lieberman, developed a surgical technique to attenuate the spread of epileptic seizures in the brain by making precise incisions with femtosecond laser pulses around epileptic foci. Check out the Cornell Chronical article here!

Postdoc Lianne Trigiani has just received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alzheimer's Association! This is the 2nd major fellowship Lianne has been awarded for research in the Schaffer-Nishimura lab (after a CIHR fellowship in 2020), a testament to her consistently high quality work!

The McClintock Letters program, organized by Cornell's ASAP (and advised by Chris Schaffer), is being officially recognized by Research Amer!ca for being a "clear voice" for public health communication in a time when it's desperately needed.
Read more about the McClintock Letters here.

 

 

MouseGoggles, the cutesy VR headset developed by Matt Isaacson and Hongyu Chang in the Schaffer-Nishimura and Ellwood Labs, has made its way to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Move over Nature - being a 15-second gag on late night TV is the real scientific achievement.

Cornell's new Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) program, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was profiled in Science Careers. One track in Cornell's BEST program focuses on science policy and is led by Chris Schaffer.

A blog post on the AAAS Member Central website describes the goals of Chris Schaffer's new science policy course, BME 4440 Science Policy Bootcamp: From Concept to Conclusion. This course is being offered for the first time this Fall, with an enrollment of about 20 undergraduate and graduate student scientists.

There are too few scientists who understand how they might contribute to public policy. In an effort to address this problem, Prof. Chris Schaffer and Dr. Catharine Clark were recently awarded a faculty fellowship from the Cornell Center of Engaged Learning and Research. This award will be used to support a new and innovative course entitled “Science Policy Bootcamp", slated for implementation in the Biomedical Engineering Department in Fall 2013. In addition to academic and administrative support from the Center of Engaged Learning and Research, Faculty Fellows will receive a stipend of $2500.