BioBusiness Summer School

From June 26th to 30th 2017, I participated in the ninth edition of the BioBusiness Summer School in Amsterdam. Having always been interested in the combination of business with healthcare, I found the call for the course to be just what I had been looking for. I had high expectations – and they were fulfilled. In the short but very efficient five-day course, I learned an incredible amount. We had lectures with biotech entrepreneurs, big company CEOs, R&D scientists, venture capitalists, patent attorneys, CFOs (finance specialists), consultants, business developers... to name a few. On the final day, we headed to the Bio Science Park in Leiden (one of the top five life sciences clusters in Europe) and visited Janssen, a pharmaceutical company of Johnson & Johnson. There was also plenty of time for networking, interacting with the speakers and getting to know the other 80 young and enthusiastic participants.

Credit: BioBusiness Summer School / Hyphen Projects

Interested?
The BioBusiness Summer School is organized by Hyphen Projects and happens once a year. Although participation costs are not exactly cheap (€1,115 in 2017), they can be covered by conference and travel funds of a PhD scholarship. Registration deadline is March 1, 2018.

Mariana Cerdeira, PhD Student AG Harms

From Sleep Researcher to Consultant to Entrepreneur

Meet Els van der Helm the ‘Sleep Geek’; Neuroscientist and founder of Shleep - the sleep company

You hold a Master and a PhD in Neuroscience. Would you tell us more about your background?

I’ve always been fascinated by sleep. I read a book by Prof. Bill Dement from Stanford when I was in high school which taught me about the magic of sleep and also the taboo around it: that we associate it with being lazy or less ambitious. That really inspired me to study clinical neuropsychology and neuroscience. So during my Master on these topics, I started to do sleep research, first at the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience in Amsterdam and then at Harvard, looking at the effect of sleep in emotional processing. And then I went on to do my PhD at UC Berkeley, looking at the effect of sleep on our brain.

Els van der Helm, sleep expert and founder of Shleep

 How was your transition from the PhD to becoming a McKinsey consultant?

I really enjoyed doing sleep research and learning about it, but at the same time I realized that doing neuroimaging is very technical and not necessarily my passion. I also missed working in a team and having a more direct impact. I really wanted to help people and the slow pace of academia didn’t fit me. So I decided to make a change and go into business and learn more about the rest of the world, beyond academia.

How was your experience as a business consultant for almost 3 years?

The beginning was quite rough in some ways and quite easy in others. Starting with the roughness: there is much more time pressure on what you are doing. I remember having meetings with my manager and instead of saying ‘I’ll see you in a week’, which was kind of the pace in academia, the answer would be ‘OK, let’s see in two hours where you are’. So, suddenly, you’re doing everything under time pressure. And for me it really meant that I still had a lot to learn about time management and organizational skills. I also had to share my documents with the rest of the team and the clients, whereas in academia it was much more individual: I could make a mess, as long as I could understand it. So the biggest changes for me were the change in pace and the level of focus that it required. It was much more intense. Also, I was at the client’s site the whole day and couldn’t for example go work out in the middle of the day if I wanted to, as I was able to do during my PhD. That was quite rough, to be honest. It was a very different way of working that I needed to learn. Different skills were required and these weren’t skills that you just get within 2 or 3 weeks. I would say I really got the hang of it when I was doing the work for about 9 to 12 months. And that’s quite normal, but coming in after a PhD or a post-doc as opposed to after a Master or a Bachelor’s degree, you expect more of yourself. So for me it was a humbling journey, having to develop all of those new skills, basically a 'consultant's toolbox'. This toolbox is not just critical in consulting, but helpful in any type of job. I also enjoyed the fact that you work in a team, you get so much feedback, training and support around you, which I didn’t really experience during my PhD. So my learning curve was a lot steeper than it had been in academia. I felt like I was using my time better. It was always a different project, team, manager, client, and industry. In consulting, every year feels like a ‘dog year’: it’s worth 7 years! (laughs) So it’s a rough transition but I’d say well worth it. You develop yourself very quickly and it’s a unique experience. There were things I loved and things I was less happy about, but overall, a very positive experience.

What motivated you to make the career change of leaving consulting in a big firm to starting your own company?

It was never really my goal to stay in consulting forever. For me, it was all about purpose. I really wanted to focus more on something I’m really passionate about. The funny thing is that when I joined McKinsey I didn’t think I would ever do anything with sleep again, but not working on sleep anymore made me realize how much I missed it, and how passionate I was about the topic. Perhaps in academia I wasn’t working on the topic in the right way: it was very technical and very slow, which I didn’t really enjoy. When I started as a consultant, I also quickly realized that, for me, business problems are really not as interesting as neuroscience and the brain. But I did really love being in the business world and interacting with people who are really smart, care about their own performance and are very ambitious. In McKinsey, we received a lot of training: in time management, stress, leadership... But never ever did the word ‘sleep’ come up. Knowing how critical sleep is for learning, attention, stress reactivity and developing new insights, I felt that was a major topic missing. 

 'IT STARTED AS MY HOBBY AND THEN GREW INTO A COMPANY'

That really inspired me to start giving sleep workshops for my colleagues and McKinsey clients. It was so much fun and there was so much interest. Giving these workshops made me realize how I could work with the topic of sleep in a way that fits me much better: translating science into practical advice (which I wasn’t really doing in academia) and seeing a direct impact on the people I was working with. That was something I cared about much more than being a consultant. It started as my hobby while at McKinsey but I really made that grow and carved out a space for myself, as the internal sleep expert. It was almost like a testing ground for me, or an incubator, where I could test my ideas, get feedback, and grow my network and skill set. So I decided to leave and started my own business, called Shleep, in 2016.

Can you please tell us more about Shleep? What are its products and who are its clients?

Our mission is to help the world sleep better. We help organizations improve their performance by improving the sleep of their leaders and employees. For this, we offer a number of products and services. We design sleep programs for companies, which means that we help them develop approaches to put sleep on the map and really embrace it in their culture, so that all employees know how important sleep is and can prioritize it better. This way, they perform better, are happier and healthier. Some other services we offer are online assessments, in-person workshops, one-on-one coaching, webinars, and we’ve developed a digital sleep coaching app that will be launched soon in the App Store, so it will also be available for individual consumers. Examples of our corporate clients are McKinsey, Deloitte, Spotify, social network companies, pharmaceutical companies, law firms, startups, amongst others. Our startup team is quite international. The office is based in Amsterdam, along with our marketing guru, Tom, and myself. My co-founder, Jöran Albers (the ‘business guy’), is based in Munich, our developer is from Switzerland but lives in the Netherlands, and Elena, a circadian rhythms PhD, is based in Canada.

http://www.shleepbetter.com/

What advice would you give to current Master and PhD students in Neuroscience who would like to leave academia?

Join our company for an internship! (laughs) I’m laughing, but I’m actually serious! What is great about our startup is that we have experience in management consulting (two people in our team) and we really use these skills in the way we run our company and develop our employees, which we are very much focused on. At the same time, you can get the startup experience, where things change very quickly, we re-prioritize all the time, things are up and down, exciting, moving fast. And we’re translating science into practical advice and products on a daily basis.

 'YOU REALLY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING THAT YOU CARE ABOUT'

Other types of advice: you really have to do something that you care about, that you’re happy to wake up for in the morning. Figure out what it is that drives you. It’s not easy. It took me a while to figure out that for me it was sleep. But look back at your life and think about some of the key moments when you were really happy, inspired or content with what you were doing. Pinpoint moments when you really enjoyed or didn’t enjoy doing something, instead of trying to imagine what you would enjoy doing, because a lot of things aren’t really like what they seem to be. And focus on your own strengths. Ask people around you what you’re good at, what they think is special about you, so you can leverage those strengths. And reach out to people in different jobs, ask if you could meet them for a coffee or talk to them for a few minutes on the phone to ask some career questions. It can be incredibly helpful to get some inside information. I wish you all the best figuring it out!

by Mariana Cerdeira, PhD Student AG Harms

This article originally appeared December 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 04, Sleep 

Neurasmus Annual Meeting

This year's annual meeting of the Neurasmus Master's program, in which Charité is a partner university, took place in the first week of July in Göttingen. 

As usual, the graduating students presented their Master theses on the first day, and this time also attended a lecture by Prof. Erwin Neher, father of the patch-clamp technique and Nobel laureate in 1991. In the evening, a guided tour through the university town welcomed the participants.

Focus on Career Development
The Neurasmus program has become strongly committed to offering career guidance to its students. The second day of the meeting was dedicated to this topic: it started with a workshop where the current students discussed their career questions and issues with the alumni. The afternoon followed with talks by invited speakers from Sartorius, a biotech company from Göttingen and parallel meetings amongst the students and the advisory board for the program coordinators to come up with ideas to improve the career development of Neurasmus students.

Art and Culture
The third day was reserved for a day trip to the neighboring city of Kassel, which included a guided tour through Documenta – a contemporary art exhibition that takes place there every five years – and the 'Hercules Park' and its several waterfalls and fountains. And, of course, the annual meeting is never complete without its traditional karaoke night.

Closure and Next Steps
On the fourth and final day of the meeting, MedNeuro alumna and program officer Julia Rummel conducted a design thinking workshop powered by her company, Innoki. The goal for the students: to investigate how to find a suitable lab for a PhD. In the evening, the graduation ceremony and dinner for the second-year students took place in a beautiful outdoor setting. It is hard to say goodbye to Neurasmates, but we know it is always a mere 'see you later'. Next year's annual meeting will take place in Bordeaux, the Neurasmus headquarters, at the end of August, together with Orientation Week for the freshmen. Until then, we in Berlin are looking forward to welcoming the new Neurasmus students who are about to start their studies at the Charité!

by Mariana Cerdeira, PhD Student AG Harms

This article originally appeared September 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 3, Spirituality in Science

The Dancing Brain

Neural Correlates of Dance

Dancing is most definitely my favorite form of art. It is actually one of the few forms that can be placed in both the categories of arts and sports (maybe we should start calling it a ‘spart’!). Dancing beautifully integrates complex motor learning and memory, rhythmic musical synchronization, and creative emotional expression. As a neuroscientist and a dancer, I feel compelled to summarize here the links between these two fascinating fields and some interesting features of the dancing brain.

Dance Performance

Not surprisingly, the brain areas that are activated during dancing are mostly the ones involved in the planning and execution of movements (motor cortex and basal ganglia), in receiving feedback from the muscles (somatosensory cortex), and in the fine tuning and coordination of movements (cerebellum) [1].

Brown and colleagues looked more deeply into which brain areas are activated by particular aspects of dancing. They placed amateur tango dancers in a positron emission tomography scanner while performing leg movements on a designed apparatus. The putamen (part of the basal ganglia) was strongly activated only when the subject danced to regular, metric music, but not to an irregular rhythm. The cerebellum was implicated in matching dance steps to music and the superior parietal lobule was engaged in spatial guidance of leg motions [2].These findings suggest that different areas of the central nervous system are responsible for the control of specific and distinct tasks in dancing.

Source: Chris Gash

Dance Observation

Other neuroimaging studies observed the brain's response to visual observation of dance. Dancers trained in either ballet or capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) and non-dancers watched videos of both these styles while their brains were scanned. All subjects showed activation of brain areas involved in action observation and simulation networks – the “mirror neuron system”.

However, activation of these areas was stronger in dance experts and even stronger when the dancers saw movements they had been trained to perform, compared to watching movements they were unfamiliar with. There was no difference in the brain activity of non-dancers while watching ballet or capoeira [3]. This shows that even passive observation of dance activates movement areas in the brain as if you were moving yourself, and that dancers have an enhanced neural representation of their personal motor repertoire.

With Practice Comes Adaptation

An interesting study showed that the brain of ballet dancers adapts to prevent them from feeling dizzy. Brain scans revealed that the vestibular cerebellum, an area responsible for the perception of dizziness, is smaller in dancers compared to non-dancers [4]. This demonstrates that even the vestibular response is sensitive to training. Also, skilled dancers depend less on vision for postural control compared to non-dancers. Instead, they rely on their highly accurate proprioception – the sense of awareness of body parts’ positions in space [5].

DANCING INCREASES NEURAL CONNECTIVITY

Professional dancers are also trained with motor techniques to perform highly demanding moves in apparently effortless ways. An electromyography study showed that, when performing swinging leg movements, skilled ballet dancers selectively applied minimal muscle tension at the very same position where the sway force was maximal. This means that they learn to optimize motor function and consequently reduce energy costs in terms of force and muscle contraction [6].

Benefits of Dancing

Several studies have observed better balance, posture, proprioception, and cardio-respiratory resistance in dancers compared to non-dancers. But don’t think you would have to become a professional to profit from these benefits. Even short episodes of breakdance training increase balance skills in young amateurs [7].

Dance practice has the potential to improve not only motor, but also cognitive skills. An impressive 21-year study showed that frequent dancing is highly protective against dementias, such as Alzheimer’s disease, lowering the risk as much as 76%! It was also found to be much more beneficial than doing crossword puzzles (47% reduced risk), reading (35%) or swimming or bicycling (0% – no difference at all) [8].

DANCERS RELY ON PROPRIOCEPTION MORE THAN VISION

Neuroplasticity is likely responsible for this effect. When we dance, we enrich our brain, making split-second decisions and creating new synapses and neural paths that become especially valuable as we age.

Dancing is not only physically demanding, it is cognitively demanding as well. So when you dance, you are exercising both your body and your brain. Regular dance training makes you improve innumerable motor and cognitive skills, contributes to brain plasticity, and enhances social interaction. And, all health benefits aside, dancing is simply fun! How much better can it possibly get?

[1] Hänggi et al, Hum Brain Mapp, 2010
[2] Brown et al, Cereb Cortex, 2006
[3] Calvo-Merino et al, Cereb Cortex, 2005
[4] Nigmatullina et al, Cereb Cortex, 2013
[5] Golomer and Dupui, Int J Neurosci, 2000
[6] Lepelley et al, Exp Brain Res, 2006
[7] Ricotti and Ravaschio, Gait Posture, 2011
[8] Verghese et al, N Engl J Med, 2003

by Mariana Cerdeira, PhD Student AG Harms

This article originally appeared 2015 in CNS Volume 8, Issue 2, Art. And the Brain.