ENCODS 2016: An Insight Into the Publishing Process

ENCODS 2017 will also offer a number of workshops. One of our students attended the "Publishing Process" workshop last year:

The ENCODS 2016 program contained inspiring keynote lectures from various neuroscience fields, interesting talks by PhD students, lunch poster sessions, various workshops to choose from and offered, last but not least, a great opportunity to meet fellow students from 35 different countries. 

Publishing in a Top Journal
An especially interesting part of the program was the workshop “The Publishing Process” held by Alexander Arguello, Associate Editor of Nature Neuroscience. He gave us a professional insight into the processes of publishing and editing and was ready to discuss associated problems. He opened the workshop with a brief history of scientific publication and then explained the editing process at Nature Neuroscience, which is coordinated by eight editors. They receive and evaluate altogether about 250 papers per month and decide on rejection or review – at the end of this process, approximately 10% of the submitted articles are accepted. Besides considering the interest of the article for the typical reader of the journal, the assessment is mainly based on the abstract, focusing on clarity, novelty, scientific benefit and a plausible concept of the study. 

Good data visualization is key

Considerable focus is also placed on graphs and pictures, which should clearly convey the message of the paper without needing the actual text – nice images are always a plus! In the end, each editor alone, sometimes after consultation with his or her colleagues, has the final say on whether a paper goes into review or is sent back to the author. We concluded this part of the workshop by evaluating various abstracts that had actually once been sent to Nature Neuroscience for their chance to be published. This was not always easy to do at first glance!

Do We Still Need Printed Journals?
During the course of the workshop, we also discussed the problems and advantages of printed journals versus open access options. As more and more papers are published every year, it is hard and time-consuming to decide which articles are worth reading, especially if they are outside one's own research focus. Printed journals can serve as a “filter” and provide a selection of important articles. However, as they are intended to reach a broader audience (and pursue financial interests), they tend to follow certain trends, as is currently happening with the Zika virus or CRISPR. Moreover, especially widely read journals such as Nature do not always succeed in identifying revolutionary, paradigm-shifting ideas. In fact, those are often published in smaller journals – so don’t feel bad if your paper doesn’t make it into Nature!

 Printed journals tend to follow fads

The majority of the workshop participants were in favor of open access publishing, as it seems to make scientific results more transparent and can provide a platform for constructive discussion. Nonetheless, there is a certain danger of false data interpretation that might lead to a misunderstanding of scientific results by non-experts. A solution to this problem might be a database only open to experts from a particular field of science. 

Scientific Journal Editor As a Job Option
For those who are still undecided whether or not to stay in research after finishing their PhD, it might be worthwhile to know that being an editor in a scientific journal is actually a realistic job option. The work as an editor at Nature Neuroscience consists not only of the above mentioned tasks, but also of travelling to various conferences to keep up with the latest developments in science. So, if you are looking for a job without all the worries about grants, funding and temporary contracts this might be a career option for you. Just go to the website of your favourite journal to check for open positions!

by Anna Pfeffer, PhD Student AG Steiner
This article originally appeared in September 2016 in "Happy Anniversary MedNeuro" 

A Journey to ENCODS 2016:A Conference Organized By and For PhDs

Still time to register for Encods Alicante Spain - the neuroscience conference for doctoral students until March 1st . The main goal of ENCODS meetings is to provide European PhD students with the opportunity to embrace the challenges of their research from a multidisciplinary outlook. Valérie Boujon attended the conference last year and highly recommends to participate

From June 28th to July 3rd 2016, many interesting speakers and neuroscience leaders attended the European Neuroscience Conference by Doctoral Students 2016 (ENCODS) that took place in Helsingør, Denmark and was already the third edition of this young conference. Previously it had taken place in Bordeaux, France in 2013, and in Sesimbra, Portugal in 2015. 

Enrichment on scientific, human, and personal levels

 

It is organized by and for doctoral students in all fields of neuroscience and from all over the world (out of around 100 participants, 35 nationalities and 46 universities were represented!). The meeting offers numerous benefits for young scientists, as it provides a friendly, interactive and intimate environment that enables students to exchange ideas about their research and network in an easier way than at other major scientific conferences.

Beautiful Denmark

The picturesque location was a charming, romantic hotel right by the Baltic seaside in the port town of Helsingør, about 45km away from Copenhagen. The rooms were tastefully decorated and each one was shared by two participants who initially did not know each other, strategically placed by the organizers to encourage social interactions from the very beginning. The program was well-organized to make use of the available time and consisted of a combination of keynote lectures, students’ talks, workshops and diverse social activities. There was just no time to feel bored.

Plenty of Fascinating Science

The keynote lectures were given by renowned scientists, such as Dr. Randall Platt, who shared with us how he developed the Cas9 mouse during his PhD at MIT; Dr. Tania Rinaldi Barkat, who gave us insight about her research in understanding the development and function of the auditory cortex; and Prof. Poul Nissen, who talked about his boundless knowledge of the structures and mechanisms of membrane transporters in the brain. All the same, the time for students’ talks was not overlooked and ranged from alcohol addiction to rhythmicity of medial septal neurons and neuroimaging of cognitive reserve. Typical poster sessions were substituted by “speed dating lunches”, during which participants had the opportunity to share knowledge and converse about their posters informally over lunch. A number of workshops were also offered, covering topics such as motivation and self-management, presentation skills, the publishing process (see page 17) and scientific creativity.

Board Games, Banquets, and Castles

In the evenings, after gourmet dinners, we were entertained with some nicely organized social activities. On the first evening, a scientific version of the board game Clue was on the menu, during which teams had to find out who the murderer of an unfortunate scientist was, what type of weapon had been used and in which part of the lab the crime had been committed. In order to answer these questions, the different teams had to collect a maximum of points and clues by answering some tricky questions, writing a song and solving a puzzle. 

Neuroscience meets... Shakespeare?

The second evening was a real surprise: a guided night tour of the Kronborg Castle, which is Denmark’s most famous castle, where the play Hamlet by Shakespeare was set. The Renaissance castle was built by the Danish King Eric VII in 1420 and used to be Denmark’s most powerful castle, as it controlled the entrance way to the Baltic Sea and collected toll from the many ships navigating through it. The castle’s ballrooms were some of the greatest in Europe at the time and Frederik II, together with his young wife, would hold huge banquets during which each guest would be served 24 dishes! The third and last evening was not as hedonistic as the times of the Kings of Kronborg, but still pretty enjoyable as it started with a gala dinner set around large round dining tables, softly covered with pristine white tablecloths. This was followed by a dancing “White & Black” Ball, accompanied by salsa and 90’s hits.

Not To Be Missed

Those three days were definitely a blast, as they were not only an enrichment at the scientific, but also at the human and personal levels. They helped me open my mind and widen my knowledge about neuroscience's unfamiliar domains. The workshops helped me train my communication skills and gave me insight about what it is like to work as an editor for a scientific journal (see page 19). Plus, I had the chance to meet extraordinary fellow PhD students that turned into international friendships! Hence, I highly recommend that all the MedNeuro PhD students take part in next year’s ENCODS, which will be held in Alicante, Spain ... or in 2018 right here in Berlin!

by Valérie Boujon, PhD Student AG Endres
This article originally appeared in September 2016 in "Happy Anniversary MedNeuro" 

Shaping Tomorrow’s Scientists

On Monday two members of the Medical Neurosciences Graduate school visited the Friedrich-Gymnasium in Luckenwalde to talk at the ocassion of "Tag der Wissenschaften".
Berlin’s young neuroscientists are dedicated to public science engagement and at conveying science to young people in and around Berlin!

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Tag der Wissenschaft in Luckenwalde
For the past few years, the MedNeuro program has been taking part in the annual Tag der Wissenschaft (Science Day) at the Friedrich-Gymnasium in Luckenwalde (about 80 km south of Berlin). Last year, Mariana Cerdeira and Ahmed Khalil attended the event, which took place in February. It spanned a whole day where high school students could listen to talks by scientists, participate in experiments, and learn about science careers.
Mari spoke about daily life in a neuroscience laboratory and gave the students an introduction to stroke models of study. My talk was split between speaking about my own career path, the similarities and differences between working in clinical medicine and biomedical research, and the basics of magnetic resonance imaging and its use in medical practice.
Several of the students seemed intrigued by a career in science and asked about the employment prospects, day-to-day challenges, and perks of being a scientist. I was also glad that they were interested in practical issues that the media has helped to bring to the public’s attention recently, such as how to recognize when someone is having a stroke and what to do.

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Brain Awareness Week
Last year’s Brain Awareness Week (BAW), a worldwide campaign led by the Dana Foundation, was a resounding success. The Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and MedNeuro organized over a dozen events between the 14th and 18th of March.
The program included a viewing of Pixar’s film Inside Out for primary school children. Depicting the delightful adventures of tiny anthropomorphized emotions inside an eleven-year old girl’s brain, the movie was followed by a Q&A with Professor Isabel Dziobek from the Humboldt University's Institute for Psychology.
Five PhD students (Henriette Edemann Callesen, Mariana Cerdeira, Judith Houtman, Lucille Alonso, and Katharina Ohrnberger) also took part in talks with 11th graders at the Berlin Metropolitan School.

A workshop on eye-tracking at the Brain Awareness Week 2016, taking place at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. Source: Margret Franke

Aiming to explain the important role that mathematics has to play in neuroscience research, Dr. Michael Scholz of the Technical University of Berlin gave a workshop on “Computing Neurons”. The participants were given a basic introduction to the brain and its function, followed by principles of mathematical modelling of neurons - in the end, they could try their hand at modelling neuronal circuits on a computer.
For anyone who’s been following the news and has wondered to what extent humans and great apes can verbally communicate, the BAW addressed this, too. In a workshop at the Humboldt Graduate School, Dr. Richard Moore from the Berlin School of Mind and Brain discussed the science behind such publicity stunts as Koko the gorilla addressing a United Nations summit in Paris about climate change.

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Long Night of Science
The last  “cleverest night of the year”, as it’s also known, took place on June 11th 2016. All of Berlin’s major neuroscience institutes took part in organizing a series of lectures, discussions, and demonstrations for the public. 

At the Max Delbrück Center (MDC), the night was long and full of knowledge. Besides their usual tour of the MDC laboratories, there were over 80 different events on offer in Campus Buch. Serenaded by some smooth jazz, four researchers presented their work to the public at Café Scientifique. There was also plenty to do for kids, who could participate in a series of small experiments, collect stamps and receive a “researcher’s certificate” at the end.

Primary school children learning about the structure of the brain at Die Gelbe Villa, an educational center for youth in Kreuzberg. Part of the Brain Awareness Week 2016. Source: Inken Dose.

It was a record-breaking year at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain this year. More than 1,500 people of all ages joined this year’s Long Night of Science events, which included memory experiments highlighting the critical role of the hippocampus, a Science Slam, and a talk on how our brains react to food and drugs.






by Ahmed Khalil, PhD Student AG Fiebach
this article originally appeared in Volume 09 Issue 3 Happy Anniversary MedNeuro

Cyborgs, Brain Highways, and Memory Erasure: The Future of Neuroscience

How will our future look like? Imagine how amazing it would be to move things around, or turn on lights only with our minds. Or if we could download our memories on a disk and retrieve them later! Sounds like something out of ancient sci-fi movies, right? But these things might not be that far from reality!

In the last few decades, neuroscience has made considerable strides in unraveling the mysteries of the human brain. With advances in the field of genetics and physics, such as human genome sequencing, optogenetics, and high resolution microscopy, scientists can now manipulate specific areas within the brain and see how they affect behavior. Large-scale projects have been initiated such as the US BRAIN initiative, bringing together scientists from all over the world with the aim of developing next-generation tools to explore how neural connections lead to thoughts, emotions or movements. Here’s a list of ongoing projects which could profoundly improve our understanding of the brain:

Connectomics
Mapping the whole human brain will be one of the biggest scientific challenges of the 21^st century. The Connectome project was launched in 2005 with the aim of determining a comprehensive map of each individual neuronal connection of the 300 million neurons in a mouse brain - or what is referred to as the ‘wiring diagram’- and ultimately map the 10 billion connections in the human brain. In the years to come, the circuitry of the whole brain will be known, and this can help us to answer how brain circuitry changes during development, aging, disease or with experience. Maybe one day we could leave behind our connectome with our memories and experiences [1]!

Blue Brain Project
Another ambitious project, The Blue Brain project, was initiated in 2005 with the goal of simulating the whole human brain. Scientists at EPFL, Switzerland, have already made progress in modeling micro columns of the mouse brain to answer how a network of neurons processes sensory information. The computer model uses an overwhelming amount of information on the type of neurons, their electrical properties, shapes and connectivity to simulate thousands of neurons, allowing scientists to understand how the brain processes information and how brain waves are generated [2].

Source: Grau et al., PLoS ONE, 2014

Brain-Machine Interface
Many of us might remember the kick-start of the football world cup in Brazil by a paraplegic man using a mind-controlled prosthetic leg. This was made possible because of advances in Brain-Machine interface (BMI) technology by scientists at Duke University. BMI technology provides a direct electronic interface and can convey messages and commands directly from the human brain to a computer. The electrical activity of the conscious brain is monitored using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, with detected patterns being digitalised and sent to a computer, or in the case of neuroprosthetics, to the control unit of a robotic arm or leg. Scientists have made progress in developing neuroprosthetics for paralyzed patients, enabling them to grasp things, even with up to six degrees of freedom [3]. So there is certainly hope ahead for paralyzed patients to walk, and to perform day-to-day activities.



Deep Brain Stimulation

Since 1987, Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become the widely recommended treatment option for movement and neuropsychiatric disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, major depression and obsessive compulsive disorders. DBS involves the implantation of a medical device called a neurostimulator, which sends electrical impulses through implanted electrodes, to specific targets in the brain. This treatment has been proven effective in some patients but it also causes some neuropsychiatric side effects such as hallucinations, euphoria, cognitive dysfunction or depression. Clinical and technological advances in DBS need to be evolved in order to offer better quality of life for patients with debilitating disorders in the years to come [4].

Future possibilities
The future of neuroscience looks exciting and promising [5]. A few years ago, scientists at MIT successfully implanted false memories in mice by just reactivating the cell assembly for the memory of foot shocks [6]. The prospect of erasing bad memories or implanting memories in cases of post traumatic stress disorders represents an exciting possibility for humans. Recently, scientists managed to transmit a message into the mind of a colleague 5,000 miles away using brain waves [7]. Maybe there comes a day in future where we can telepathically send emails!
We have only reached the tip of the iceberg of unlocking the clockwork of the brain. This is evident from the fact that we have not yet been able to fully understand the simple 302 neuron- circuitry of C. elegans. Fundamental questions such as how we perceive with our senses, how we navigate through the world or bigger questions such as how do our thought processes work or what makes us conscious beings have been unanswered. The sheer complexity of the human brain will keep the neuroscientists around the world busy for the next decades for sure.

1. braininitiative.nih.gov
2. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
3. Collinger et al., Lancet, 2013
4. ninds.nih.gov
5. Wall Street Journal
6. Ramirez et al., Science, 2012
7. dailymail.co.uk

by Aarti Swaminathan, PhD Student AG Schmitz

The Future Is Now… And It Grants PhDs

What are your expectations and hopes for 2017? Thinking about the future can be intimidating and scary at some times. Did you know that trying to predict the future is a real science?

Tell me, what will the weather be like tomorrow? Do you think your next experiment will go well? How will food supply chain systems influence South American elections 20 years from now? The future can be both tangible and remarkably remote. Trying to predict it may at times seem hopeless, yet at other times, may be as simple as sticking your head out the window and deciding to take an umbrella to work. 

Future Studies: The Academic Discipline of Today?

Source: Vintageprintable1, via Flickr 

To many, a “professional futurist” may conjure the image of someone in a tin foil hat reading a lot of science fiction, and in fact, the discipline does have its roots in literature. For many, the birth of futurism came with Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the 20^th Century (written 1733), which tried to predict geopolitical trends, but had little to say about development of science or technology [1]. H.G. Wells took another (and doubtlessly flashier) approach by imagining a world in which aliens, gadgets, and time travel defined human possibilities. Real 20^th century problems, like the possibility of thermonuclear war, or the benefits of a planned economy also helped boost the discipline, as did the rise of advanced computing/simulation.
Today, Future Studies is a full-fledged academic discipline, available for study (including PhDs) around the world. Some schools focus on sub-specialties, such as predicting business trends at the Turku School of Economics [2], while others take a more general approach. Their main concern may be summarized by “three Ps and a W”: futures that are possible, probable or preferable, plus so-called “wildcard” futures [3]. At face value, the whole concept of futurism seems a little wacky, but the more you think about it, the more it seems to make sense. More traditional fields such as history and sociology attempt to reverse engineer complex systems (i.e. society and culture) to make sense of what has happened. Why not try the whole thing the other way around?

Not Just Science Fiction
It may be true that futurism tries to make sense of a great deal of non-static, complexly interrelated factors, but it can be broken down into more tangible components. This is done every day not just by professional futurists, but by people in more mundane professions such as stock traders, meteorologists, and insurance assessors. One common predictive method in all of these disciplines is predictive modelling, or building a simulation to describe possible outcomes given possible constraints. Systems engineering, too, builds projects around estimations of future states, for example, building a “smart” supply chain that can respond to up-to-the-minute demands.

Other methods employed by futurists have been adopted from the social sciences. For example, social network analysis uses the nature of connections within a community to predict how that community will respond to changes in the environment [4]. It was originally used in anthropology and sociology but is becoming more and more common in other “futuristic” fields like epidemiology and marketing. Another example is the Delphi Method, which uses structured interviews and feedback to combine and extrapolate from the opinions of experts [5].

FUTURES MAY BE POSSIBLE,
PROBABLE, OR PREFERABLE.

 Yet for every interdisciplinary success, there are methods that appear to be very puzzling, at least to an outsider. For example, most people are familiar with trend analysis, which identifies factors that strongly influence the present, and uses them to project future scenarios. However, future studies also employs Emerging Issues Analysis [6], which does the exact opposite: identifying unimportant forces or events in the present, and predicting what could happen if they were to become important in the future. There are also a host of other methods based on “visioning” and “future biographies” which are significantly heavier on imagination than math or statistics. But if they end up being accurate (see, for example, H.G. Wells’ accurate predictions about modern warfare [7]), are they any less valid?

Think Like a Futurist
Would it surprise you to learn that you are likely also a futurist? While your day-to-day may not involve planning for the rise and fall of geopolitical powers, most readers of this newsletter make their living by making and testing predictions. In the form of scientific hypotheses. After all, having semi-reasonable expectations about your experiments means that you will most likely make efficient use of your time and resources in the lab. The role of prediction in biomedicine has been extensively studied, and is beginning to be rolled out in concrete practice. Less is known about how skillfully biologists can tell the future (see Box 1).

Thinking about the future, especially in an academic context, can have profound implications for the way we envision and plan for the consequences of our actions. But one side effect is that it also calls practitioners to question their assumptions about the present. If you fervently believe that, say, a certain candidate winning the American election would result in disastrous foreign policy decisions, what does that say about foreign policy at present? Or the electoral system that would get them there in the first place? At the end of the day, predicting the future calls for a profound understanding of the present. Whether or not you choose to make future studies a full-time occupation, that should be a universal priority.




[1] Alkon, Sci Fict Stud 1985
[2] University of Turku
[3] Wikipedia
[4] Otte and Rousseau, J Inf Sci, 2002
[5] RAND Corporation
[6] Inayatullah, Foresight 2008
[7] The Telegraph

by Constance Holman, PhD Student AG Schmitz
this article originally appeared September 2016 in Volume 09 Isuue 3 "Happy Anniversary MedNeuro!"