This summer’s faculty seminar series has been incredibly informative and compelling– I particularly enjoyed listening to the personal life/ journey segments that all the speakers incorporated into their presentations, as they made these accomplished speakers seem more relatable. Additionally, I really appreciated the broad spectrum of research subjects that were selected, all of which fell into the world of biomedical science and covered everything from genomics to brain-machine interfaces, evolution, molecular biology, etc. and hopefully a little more chemistry in the week left. The speaker whose work stood out most for me was Dr. Christina Williams, who spoke about how increased aerobic capacity could essentially enhance hippocampal neurogenesis.
The idea of neural plasticity is really cool to me because it shows the brain is so much more capable than we would expect a 3 lb mass of fatty tissue and neurons to be. This was a concept also explored in Dr. Viventi’s work — that the brain is able to learn how to incorporate man-made tools as part of the body is so amazing. Likewise, that increasing the amount of aerobic exercise is able to encourage adult neurogenesis and thus cognition, stress resilience, memory, etc. could have huge implications. For example, could these results be meaningful for Alzheimer’s patients? Additionally, I think that this finding illustrated how science is very dependent on serendipity. Without early findings that mice that lived in environments with running cages had more dentate gyrus (area in the hippocampus) neurogenesis relative to mice who lived in regular laboratory cages, perhaps this work never would have been taken down this particular path.
