Jamila Guard chose to attend Florida State University for its renowned neuroscience program. She has dedicated her research to finding treatments for binge eating and bulimia syndromes. Her passion is evident through her involvement in Department of Psychology Professor Lisa Eckel’s neuroscience lab, where she examines how semaglutide (Ozempic) affects binge eating.

Guard is also an Ignite Fellow with Teach for America and helps elementary and middle school students with math and reading. She focuses on targeting weaknesses and boosting students’ confidence, finding satisfaction in their academic growth and excitement for learning.

Guard hopes her research and dedication to education will inspire other undergraduates to start their own research. Her goal is to provide academic resources for underprivileged students and ensure they have access to educational opportunities in the future.

 What made FSU stand out to you when you were applying to colleges?

I chose to attend FSU because of its undergraduate neuroscience program. After learning about the topic in early high school, I knew I wanted to pursue neuroscience as a career. I wanted to make the best financial decision for my family and me, so I decided to focus on universities in Florida. At the time, most Florida universities did not offer a dedicated neuroscience program, but rather degrees in related topics with a focus in neuroscience. I preferred my undergraduate education to focus on neuroscience as a discipline, rather than a branch of other scientific fields. 

I also chose FSU for its beautiful and walkable campus. FSU’s beauty stood out during my touring process. Tallahassee has been full of activities to do and amazing memories to make. I have been fortunate to build a meaningful, dependable community here that I do not believe I could have found anywhere else.  

How have FSU’s programs supported your academic accomplishments?

One of my most significant accomplishments at FSU is my research project within Dr. Eckel’s lab. My project examines a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist, semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic, the popular weight loss drug) and its effects on dysregulated eating in a pre-clinical rat model of binge eating. Available treatments for bulimic syndromes are limited, making my study significant, as it may help identify GLP-1 as a novel therapeutic target for reducing binge eating in individuals with bulimic syndromes. I was awarded an IDEA grant, which has significantly advanced my research endeavors. This generous funding has allowed me to fully immerse myself in my research goals. I am fortunate to be part of an institution that offers such a wealth of funding opportunities for students to pursue their academic and professional aspirations. 

What is one of your most rewarding community service experiences?

Beyond the classroom, I have been an Ignite Fellow for the past two years. The Ignite Fellowship is a tutoring program provided by Teach for America. As a tutor, I lead a small group of K-8 students through virtual math or reading lessons each semester. I create weekly lesson plans based on students’ weaknesses and school learning guidelines. I focus on building a welcoming environment to foster strong, meaningful relationships, allowing my students to fully embrace learning. It is incredibly rewarding to see students who were once shy when introducing themselves now eagerly shouting out answers before I even finish reading the practice questions.  

How would you describe your impact on FSU students and beyond?

I believe my strong commitment to research serves as a model for underclassmen, demonstrating the potential of research opportunities at FSU. I envision myself as a guide for my peers, informing them about the many opportunities available once they engage in research.  

My work aims to expand existing literature on treatments for bulimic syndromes, addressing their impact on both the local community and individuals worldwide. As a tutor, I contribute to the educational system locally and beyond by offering personalized support to young students. Most of the students I tutor are people of color or from lower-income communities and lack access to essential learning resources. My purpose is to bridge this gap and offer an enriching learning experience. By doing so, I help ensure that all students have the opportunity to achieve academic success both now and in the future.  

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A new study by neuroscientists at Florida State University has revealed brain differences that may explain why humans demonstrate a variety of cognitive abilities and behaviors.

The research, conducted by a multi-institution team led by FSU Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Caterina Gratton and research technician Ally Dworetsky, shows that two forms of individual differences may predict cognitive abilities, explain behavioral differences and even pinpoint biomarkers of brain disease.

“We discovered that in addition to individual brain differences located along the borders of brain regions, such as the border between visual and parietal regions of the brain, individual differences can also occur in a different way. Some variations are further away from where you would expect, popping up like islands,” said Dworetsky, a research assistant in the Gratton Lab and the study’s lead author. “We call these ectopic intrusions since they occur in unexpected locations.”

The study — in coordination with colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, University of Oxford and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

“This research reconceptualizes how we think about how brains can differ from one another and what these differences mean,” Gratton said. “Additionally, this helps us approach new research questions such as how these differences affect brain development, behavioral traits, the development of disorders and more.”

With a more complete understanding of what is happening in the brain, researchers can better assess the mechanisms underlying what leads brains to differ from one another, which supports the study of brain disorders and diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, an area of research that Gratton has pursued for years.

“This collaboration is a continuation of a previous study on trait-like variants in human functional brain networks that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019,” Dworetsky said. “The goal of these studies is to better understand how individual differences in the brain manifest in people and reconceptualize how variability in the brain may link to differences in cognition and behavior.”

This recent study, “Two common and distinct forms of variation in human functional brain networks,” is unique in how it approaches brain network variations because previous work on this topic treated individual differences as equivalent and primarily linked to boundary shifts between the borders of brain regions. Identifying additional individual differences in the form of ectopic intrusions helps researchers better understand how each of these differences manifests and how the brain functions normally.

By taking extensive measures of individuals, including scanning the brains of individuals 10 or more times using functional MRI scanning, researchers can reliably identify these locations and obtain more detailed characterizations relative to what is possible with more typical approaches. This data was used to develop methods that identify the border shifts and ectopic intrusions.

“What we found when looking at the data is that the ectopic variants are a quite common phenomenon — it’s more frequent than we expected to have these unusual locations of variations,” Gratton said. “This means we need to think about mechanisms for how the brain can differ that may cause long-range changes in both the connectivity and function between different brain regions.”

Dworetsky, who earned her bachelor’s degree in 2018 from WashU and joined the Gratton Lab in 2020, worked to show that both border shifts and ectopic variants also differ in many ways: they are located in different parts of the brain, they interconnect with different brain systems, and they differ across samples that are genetically similar.

“We learned that separating border shifts and ectopic intrusions can be very informative in our understanding of how these individual differences occur in our brain and also what they may tell us about how the brain functions,” Dworetsky said.

With team members from collaborating institutions specializing in various analyses, ranging from using machine learning techniques to predict demographic and behavioral variables from brain data to heritability and genetic analysis, the researchers were able to better understand genetic and environmental factors and how they played out in the manifesting of brain differences.

“We plan to dig into the cognitive variables that we predict will be affected by these differences, especially to see if these differences can be predictive in certain brain disorders,” Gratton said of forward-looking research.

To learn more about the Department of Psychology at FSU, visit psychology.fsu.edu. For more information about FSU’s Neuroscience Program, visit neuro.fsu.edu.

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Four Florida State University faculty members are recipients of a new grant from the National Science Foundation that will fund collaborative research aimed at improving our knowledge of an understudied area of biology: the sense of taste.

Distinguished Research Professor of Mathematics Richard Bertram, who also holds appointments in FSU’s Institute for Molecular Biophysics and Program in Neuroscience, will lead the project, funded by a $430,000 grant, to uncover new patterns in the neural codes that communicate our sense of taste using unique mathematical methods.

In “New Approaches for Interpreting Neural Responses to Behaviorally-Relevant Sensory Stimuli,” Bertram, along with Associate Professor Martin Bauer and Assistant Professor Tom Needham in the Department of Mathematics and Assistant Professor Roberto Vincis in the Department of Biological Science and Program in Neuroscience at FSU, will leverage recently developed tools from mathematics and network science to uncover patterns of electrical activity of neurons in the brain that code information about the foods we eat.

“The brain is made up of billions of tiny cells called neurons,” Vincis said. “These neurons communicate through electrical signals to share and process information about the world around us, enabling us to navigate our environment, to shape our behaviors, and to create lasting memories. What we’re trying to understand is the patterns of these electrical signals (i.e., the neural code) that explain sweet and sour, cold and hot, good and bad flavors in the brain, and finally drive our eating choices.”

“We’re applying new math tools that can extract these patterns not typically showcased by traditional methods,” Needham continued.

Using newly developed mathematical techniques, researchers hope to better understand how the brain senses taste, and these techniques can be used in many other areas of neuroscience where large data sets on human brain functions often manifest.

The cross-disciplinary project was born out of experimental data collected by FSU neuroscience doctoral student Cecilia Bouaichi and analyzed by FSU statistics alumnus Camden Neese (M.S., 2022), under the direction of the interdisciplinary team of professors, which resulted in a study published in 2022 in the Journal of Neuroscience. FSU biomathematics doctoral student Audrey Nash has since joined the team and is analyzing new data sets in different ways.

“This project has blossomed into a larger opportunity for biologists like myself to collaborate with mathematicians such as Bertram, Needham and Bauer to leverage new data analysis that will significantly enhance our ability to decipher and extract meaningful insights from large neuroscience data sets,” Vincis said.

As one of NSF’s recently established funding programs, Emerging Mathematics in Biology is intended to facilitate developments of biology-inspired mathematical theories, methodologies and innovative modeling approaches to advance understanding of challenging biological problems. Funding from this program will allow these four FSU scientists to bring on more research assistants to work on the project.

“We’re truly grateful for this NSF funding because it allows the incredible students who work with us daily to continue pursuing their interests in the project,” Bauer said. “Not only does this grant open opportunities for our students to pursue advanced research and travel to conferences, but it makes them more competitive for the impending job market in academia or industry upon their graduation.”

Because this project prompts potential discoveries in both math and biology, scientists have utilized cross-departmental and cross-disciplinary relationships, allowing them to learn from each other weekly and brainstorm new directions for the project according to their respective fields.

For Needham and Bauer, this means using pure math concepts for more concrete applications. For Vincis and Bertram, this means further pursuing the inner workings of the human nervous system from an interdisciplinary perspective. Together, the team plans to build a comprehensive mathematical toolkit for future scientists to apply to brain research on the sense of taste and other concepts.

“I have worked with experimentalists my whole career in both biology and math, and it’s the best part of my job,” Bertram said. “I’m always applying my math towards biological things, so it’s been hugely beneficial having people with many different skillsets on the team. My hope is that through NSF’s support and many others willing to do the work, we can continue to cultivate an environment of interdisciplinary at FSU for professors and students now and in the future.”

To learn more about mathematics research at FSU, visit math.fsu.edu. To learn more about FSU’s biological science and neuroscience research, visit bio.fsu.edu and neuro.fsu.edu.

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Obesity is a widespread problem, with the National Institutes of Health reporting more than two in five adults in the U.S. are considered obese or severely obese. But what occurs in the brain that leads someone to reach for food, whether they are hungry or not?

A Florida State University researcher has received a four-year, $1.6 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to identify the role that a specific group of neurons in the brain play in driving hunger-motivated, or homeostatic, food seeking and eating, and how these may differ from the neural mechanisms that impact non-hunger motivated, or hedonic, food seeking and eating.

Xiaobing Zhang, an assistant professor in the FSU Program in Neuroscience, is the lead investigator for the research. The grant comes on the heels of a five-year, $1.8 million NIH grant Zhang’s lab received in 2021 to study how certain neural circuits in the brain regulate eating behaviors.

Zhang’s previous study revealed that a brain region located between the thalamus and hypothalamus, the zona incerta, plays a critical role in controlling food intake. This latest research aims to identify how a small group of zona incerta neurons drive hunger-motivated behaviors, and how they compare to neurons that regulate the motivation for hedonic eating.

In this Q-and-A, Zhang discusses his work and how this research can positively impact public health.

Q: Can you tell us about your area of research and how you first became interested in it?

A: Obesity has become a common disease that seriously challenges public health. Based on the new data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity costs the U.S. health care system nearly $173 billion a year. About 15 years ago, I became interested in understanding how the brain controls food intake and what leads to overeating and obesity. My early work was mainly focused on the neurobiology of energy balance in which the brain monitors the energy states of the body by sensing the metabolic hormone signals. However, in the U.S. and other developed countries, increased motivation for food high in fat and sugar causes overconsumption that is not driven by an energy deficit. Cumulative evidence has indicated that overeating of energy-dense fast food is one of the fundamental causes for overweight and obesity globally. Therefore, I became more interested in the neural mechanisms of the brain that regulate motivation for both homeostatic and hedonic eating when I set up my lab at FSU.

Q: What types of work will this grant allow you to conduct?

A: Our brain controls when and what to eat through sensing both internal physiological metabolic signals and external environmental stimuli associated with previous rewarding experience of food consumption. However, how the brain integrates all this information to regulate feeding motivation remains largely unknown. This grant will allow us to study a critical role of a novel dopamine signaling pathway of the brain in the regulation of motivated food seeking, which is normally initiated by energy deficit of the body. With the project granted by this award, we hope to understand how both physiological and psychological hunger signals drive motivation for food intake.

Q: What is most important for the public to know about your work?

A: Although food consumption is an innate behavior we experience every day, what determines the frequency and the size of our daily meals is quite complex. Among all possible factors, motivated food seeking is critical for positively affecting ultimate food consumption when an effort is required for obtaining the food.

In the wild, animals must work vigorously to compete for food with others. Without a strong motivation for food seeking, it is hard for wild animals to survive. In developed countries like the United States, we do not need to fight for food supply since food is widely available. Therefore, overeating often occurs when our motivational effort for food reward surpasses the energy requirement of our body. This is one of the major reasons that obesity is increasing around the world.

Our work funded by this grant will help us to understand not only the neural mechanism for controlling food seeking but also the pathological neural plasticity that causes abnormal feeding motivation that leads to obesity and eating disorders. The hope is that the public will learn from these research findings how they can adjust their behaviors for controlling food consumption. More importantly, we hope our studies will eventually lead to a better strategy for treating obesity and eating disorders.

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