A Wirelessly-Powered Experimental Arena for Electrophysiology and Behavioral Neuroscience Research on Small Freely Behaving Animals
Speaker: Maysam Ghovanloo
Affiliation: Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract: Advanced research instruments for in vivo experiments on small animal subjects are necessary tools for progress in various biological research from neuroscience to genetics. They are also key in design, development, and evaluation of new drugs and medical devices in the preclinical phase. These experiments are predominantly conducted on rodents, particularly rats and mice, to the extent that 10s of millions of animals are used annually for various research purposes all across the world. We are developing a smart and scalable experimental environment, known as the EnerCage system, which can reduce some of the most labor-intensive, costly, and least scientifically attractive aspects of the longitudinal behavioral studies on freely behaving small animal subjects. This technology is expected to improve the quality of the collected data and reproducibility of the experiments in behavioral research by creating an enriched environment, as close as possible to the animals’ natural habitat, while minimizing various sources of potential bias. It also allows running parallel high throughput experiments on multiple animal subjects simultaneously over extended periods either together in one cage or separated, while requiring minimal intervention from the research personnel, which is a source of stress and bias on the animal subjects and experiment outcomes, respectively.
Biography: Maysam Ghovanloo received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, and the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1997. He also received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2003 and 2004. Dr. Ghovanloo developed the first modular Patient Care Monitoring System in Iran where he also founded a startup to manufacture physiology and pharmacology research laboratory instruments. From 2004 to 2007, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of ECE at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. Since 2007, he has been with the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is a Professor and the founding director of the GT-Bionics Lab. He has 8 issued patents and has authored or coauthored more than 200 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications on implantable microelectronic devices, integrated circuits and micro-systems for IMD applications, and modern assistive technologies.
Dr. Ghovanloo was the general chair of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS 2015) in Atlanta, GA in Oct. 2015. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part II (2008-2011), as well as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. He has also served on the Imagers, MEMS, Medical and Displays subcommittee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) from 2009-2014. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Tommy Nobis Barrier Breaker Award for Innovation, and Distinguished Young Scholar Award from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage.
For more information contact Professor Sam Emaminejad (emaminejad@ucla.edu)
Date/Time:
Date(s) - May 01, 2017
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095