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Dan Huh Receives Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Grant for Placenta-on-a-chip Research

CRI huh
Dan Huh, Ph.D.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced $14 million in funding to support 29 interdisciplinary teams who are investigating the role of inflammation in disease. Among these recipients is Dan Huh, Associate Professor in Bioengineering, whose placenta-on-a-chip research will “explore how maternal and fetal cells respond to specific inflammatory signals and analyze the network of placental cells and immune cells that impact pregnancy outcomes in chronic inflammatory diseases.”

Kellie Ann Jurado, Presidential Assistant Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Microbiology, will lead the research team. She and Huh will collaborate with Monica Mainigi, William Shippen, Jr. Assistant Professor of Human Reproduction in Penn Medicine.

A version of the Huh Lab’s placenta-on-a-chip from 2018

Huh’s placenta-on-a-chip consists of a small block of silicone containing microfluidic channels separated by a membrane of human cells. Variations in designs and cell types allow researchers to study how different molecules cross that barrier, allowing for experiments that would be otherwise impossible or unethical. For example, Huh and his group previously used a placenta-on-a-chip designed to model the placental barrier to research the effect of maternally-administered medications on the fetal bloodstream.

In this new study, Huh, Jurando and Mainigi were motivated by even more fundamental questions of pregnancy.

“It has been known for quite some time that women with chronic inflammatory diseases are at increased risk of developing various complications during pregnancy,” Huh says. “Despite accumulating clinical evidence, we understand little about how inflammation contributes to adverse pregnancy outcomes.”

Read the full story on the Penn Engineering blog.

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Bridging the Communication Divide for Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Communities

Clear-fronted face masks, better and more frequent interpreters, and amped up involvement from local organizations have made a big difference during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Michele Berger

Since April 23, when bioengineering alum Kate Panzer (above) and her partners at the Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre started taking orders for masks with clear fronts, they’ve shipped about 450, with a backlog of requests for hundreds more. (Image: Courtesy Kate Panzer)

Because COVID-19 spreads via respiratory droplets that disperse through sneezes and coughs, shielding the mouth and nose is an important weapon against the virus. But it can also hinder conversations for people who rely on reading lips. “Communication barriers are already difficult sometimes, and this makes it more difficult,” says linguist , director of ’s .

It’s one of the trickiest aspects of this pandemic for those in the Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, Fisher says. The challenge doesn’t stem just from misunderstandings due to wearing masks. It’s also about the dissemination of accurate and timely information, knowing who to rely on and how to assess what’s being said.

Trusted sources like the Swarthmore, Pennsylvania–based nonprofit Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre (DHCC), a Penn community partner, have filled that gap, frequently updating information on its social media channels and websites. Governors and mayors are more frequently using Certified Deaf Interpreters (CDI) during press briefings, and Penn alum Kate Panzer, who graduated in 2018, started a project with DHCC to sew masks with clear fronts to offer both lip-reading access and protection.

Innovative masks

Like much of the country, Panzer has stayed inside for the past several months. When the pandemic started to worsen, she temporarily left a research position in Michigan and returned to her childhood home in Media, Pennsylvania. And like many people, she wanted to give back.

At Penn, she’d taken several American Sign Language classes through the program Fisher runs, so when she read an article about a student in Kentucky making clear-fronted masks, it piqued her interest. She reached out to Fisher, who connected her with Kyle Rosenberg, DHCC’s community development and outreach coordinator.

As a volunteer, she shared her mask idea with Rosenberg. “Even in normal times, the Deaf community really struggles with clear communication,” says Rosenberg, who is himself deaf. “ASL is very visual. It relies on body language. Covering up the mouth with a mask makes communication 10 times harder.”

Rosenberg helped Panzer tweak a design and create a process to reach the community, and they took their first order on April 23. Since then, they’ve shipped about 450 masks, with a backlog of requests for hundreds more.

Though the response has been overwhelmingly positive, when constructive feedback comes in, they do take it to heart, Panzer says. For example, when mask-wearers told them that the elastic bands they’d been using rubbed uncomfortably against hearing aids, they switched to fabric ties that go around the back of the head. The masks are not medical grade, so they can’t be used in a hospital setting, but Panzer says her goal was to improve everyday interactions.

“When you can only see the eyes, it takes a lot out of expressive communication for Deaf people,” says Fisher, whose parents and one brother are deaf. “It’s really important that they be able to more fully convey facial expressions and mouth movements that influence meaning.” Masks with clear fronts help.

Continue reading at .

Kate Panzer earned her bachelor’s degree in 2018 from the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a disability health and family medicine research assistant at Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan. 

NB: Kate has done prior work with ASL during her time at Penn Bioengineering. Kate’s 2018 Senior Design team created a two-way interface to help communication between deaf patients and hearing medical professionals called MEDISIGN. Fellow team members included fellow BE alumni Jackie Valeri, Nick Stiansen, and Karol Szymula. Watch their presentation on the Penn Engineering youtube channel.

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President’s Innovation Prize Winner Strella Biotechnology Raises $3.3 Million in Seed Funding

Alumni Malika Shukurova (left) and Katherine Sizov, Strella Biotechnology

Last year, Katherine Sizov (BIO ’19) and Malika Shukurova (BE ’19) earned the 2019 President’s Innovation Prize for their plan to use Internet-of-Things technology to monitor fruit ripeness and reduce waste in produce supply chains. Their company, Strella Biotechnology, received $100,000 of financial support, a $50,000 living stipend for both awardees, and a year of dedicated co-working and lab space at the Pennovation Center.

Now, it has $3.3 million on hand as it attempts to take its technology into retail stores.

As reported in Technically Philly and the Philadelphia Business Journal, the “fruit hacking” company’s seed round funding comes from several venture capital firms, including Pennovation’s Red & Blue Ventures, as well as celebrity investor Mark Cuban.

Strella’s ethylene sensors are already being used by fruit packers in order to more precisely time shipments as their produce ripens. The Penn start-up company thinks retailers could similarly benefit when it comes to deciding when to put their stock out for sale.

Read more at Technically Philly and the Philadelphia Business Journal.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Blog.

NB: The initial work for Strella Biotechnology was done by Sizov in Penn Bioengineering’s  George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory and Bio-MakerSpace. Read more about how BE’s Bio-MakerSpace has become a hub for start-ups here.

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Lyle Ungar on Normalizing Face Masks

As scientists continue to battle the novel coronavirus, public health officials maintain that wearing a face mask is a powerful way to curb the spread of the virus and keep communities safe. However, America has struggled to adopt this change, as compared to other countries that have made wearing a face mask an unremarkable aspect of their culture.

Lyle Ungar, Ph.D.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Lyle Ungar, Professor of Computer and Information Science, Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor in Penn Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, propose a new approach to increase consistent face mask use among Americans: make wearing a mask “easy,” “understood,” and “expected.”

In their article, Ungar, Duckworth, and Emanuel make reference to communities that provided face masks free of charge for residents and note the decrease in infection in these areas. In addition, they point out how uncertainty about the necessity of face masks in the U.S. has led to public confusion which inhibits trust and use of masks. Finally, the three researchers push for a shift in social norms to embrace wearing a face mask as standard in America for the near future.

Some of Ungar’s recent research is also focused on the pandemic, including a “COVID Twitter map,” created with colleagues at the World Well-Being Project and Penn Medicine’s Center for Digital Health. Their map helps show, in real time, how people across the country perceive the virus and how it is affecting their mental health.

Read more about Ungar, Duckworth, and Emanuel’s strategy for normalizing face masks in their opinion piece for the New York Times.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering blog.

Lyle Ungar is a Professor of Computer and Information Science (CIS) and a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

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Jennifer Phillips-Cremins Promoted to Associate Professor

 

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ph.D.

by Sophie Burkholder

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ph.D., was recently promoted to the tenured position of Associate Professor in Penn’s Department of Bioengineering. Cremins, leads a lab on campus in 3D Epigenomes and Systems Neurobiology.

In a recent piece profiling top technologies to watch in 2020, Cremins spoke to Nature about which technological trends she saw as being important for the year to come. In the panel, which highlighted perspectives from a panel of researchers across several fields, Cremins discussed the increasing relevance of innovations that would allow researchers to study the way that folding patterns within the human genome can influence how genes are expressed in  healthy individuals and misregulated in human disease.

One such innovation is actually employed by the Cremins Lab: light-activated dynamic looping (LADL). This technique uses both CRISPR/Cas9 and optogenetics to induce folding patterns into the genome on demand, using light as a trigger. In doing so, Cremins and her fellow researchers can more efficiently study the patterns of the human genome, and what effects certain folding patterns can have on the gene expression  state of the cell.

Now, with her new promotion, Cremins can continue advancing her research in understanding the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate neural connections during brain development, with a focus on how that understanding can eventually lead to better treatments of neurological disease. Beyond the lab, she’ll now lead a new Spatial Epigenetics program, bringing together scientists across Penn’s campus to understand how the spatial connections between biomolecules influence biological behavior. She will also continue teaching her hallmark course for Penn Bioengineering undergraduate students, Biological Data Science, and her more advanced graduate-level course in epigenomics. Congratulations, Dr. Cremins!

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How Penn’s Medical Device Development Course Adapted to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Though BE 472 was able to quickly pivot to an entirely online curriculum, some in-person aspects of the course were unfortunately lost. Pictured: BE 472’s Spring 2019 MedTech panel discussion with industry leaders Katherine High, MD (President of Spark Therapeutics), Lucas Rodriguez, PhD (CEO of CerSci Therapeutics), and Penn BE alumnus Brianna Wronko (CEO of Group K Diagnostics) (credit: Lauren McLeod BE 2020).

by Sophie Burkholder

Given the closing of schools in response to the coronavirus pandemic, professors teaching lab-based courses were forced to make some changes. One such course, the Department of Bioengineering’s Medical Device Development (BE 472) taught by Matthew R. Maltese, Ph.D., usually requires students to develop a medical device and learn how to lead a startup venture for it. Over the semester, students design prototypes for unmet needs in the medical device community, and then go on to learn about business-related aspects of the project, like fundraising, regulations, teamwork, and leadership. Maltese often encourages junior engineering students to take the course, in the hopes that their projects might become launchpads for their senior design projects the following year.

But with the pandemic’s interruptions to education restricting access to the lab, or even to some of the schematics for their earlier designs, Maltese’s Spring 2020 students had to re-focus on the business side of their projects.

Fortunately, the shift to online learning came late enough in the semester that most students had already come up with solid project ideas. Maltese then shifted gears to the less hands-on parts of the course. “There’s lots of elements to this course that are not focused on putting hands on hardware,” he says. “They’re focused on distilling and disseminating information about your endeavor to people that are interested.”

While some of those more hands-off assignments originally had some face-to-face aspects, like the final pitch competition, they’re also easy to transition to an online format. Maltese had students record videos of their pitches, which he notes is perhaps more akin to what they might have to do for external pitch competitions. And even though students couldn’t make their physical prototypes, Maltese says that they were all able to make virtual prototypes through CAD or other modeling software.

In his opinion, this renewed focus on out-of-lab prototype models might be a good thing for real-world experience. Investors and stakeholders often want the full picture of a device or startup before they even have to start working with physical material, for the sake of cost efficiency.

Students had already been working on their projects for a couple of months before the pandemic started to affect classes, so most of them stuck to their original ideas instead of adapting them to meet the needs of the current medical crisis. “Next year, I think we’re going to focus the class on COVID-19 ideas though,” says Maltese.

In fact, Medical Device Development will likely be one of many Penn Bioengineering courses that adapts its curriculum to the challenges the pandemic presented. “As a medical device community, a pharmaceutical community, a healthcare community, we were not ready for this,” Maltese notes, “but history teaches us that some of our greatest innovations emerge from our greatest trials.”  He is excited for the future.

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A Message to the Penn Bioengineering Community

A message to the Penn Bioengineering community from BE leadership:

Dear BE Nation,

We wanted you to know that we in BE fully stand behind and reiterate the message from President Gutmann in full support of our Black students, postdocs, staff, colleagues, and friends.

As noted by President Gutmann, we all are feeling outrage, anger, grief, and myriad other emotions. We are at a loss to comprehend and to process the magnitude and implications of the brutality, oppression, and injustice that have come to light once again following the horrific event of George Floyd’s murder.

Several students and colleagues have reached out expressing their desires to contribute actively to effect a positive and progressive change. Our President Gutmann and Provost Pritchett have summarized some of the Penn initiatives towards our local communities in their message linked above. Numerous others are proactively contributing large and small. While we may not agree on many things, we can all agree that a lot remains to be done, and it will take time and sustained effort and commitment on our part. We are committed to the cause: to effect continual and progressive change for nurturing equality and cultural sensitivity as we build a diverse academic ecosystem, and this includes BE, Penn, and our surrounding community. It is our commitment to our Black friends and colleagues.

We take this opportunity to share this article sent by Denise Lay: Answering the Question, ‘What Can I Do?’ and this document compiled by BE Ph.D. student Lasya Sreepada created to share resources and opportunities for members of the University of Pennsylvania community to help their local communities.

Also, here are a  few resources to help cope:

Racial Justice and Equity (from Bucketlisters): A listing of resources, organizations and actions, including Philadelphia specific organizations.

Coping with Racial Trauma (recommended by Penn’s Counseling and Psychological Services [CAPS]): A mental, emotional, physical and spiritual toolkit for coping with racial trauma which provides a window into the personal cost of systemic racism, discrimination and inequality.

Mostly and immediately, we write this note to reiterate that we stand with and support our Black students, postdocs, staff, colleagues, and friends in this difficult period.

Sincerely yours,

Undergraduate Chair Andrew Tsourkas
Graduate Chair Yale Cohen
Department Chair Ravi Radhakrishnan

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2020 Awards Season for Bioengineering Students

Each spring, the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania gives out awards of special recognition to honor exceptional work by undergraduate and graduate students. The Department of Bioengineering is proud to announce the following awards given to students in the Class of 2020.

Bioengineering Professor and Chair Ravi Radhakrishnan says, “Congratulations to all the winners! I am so incredibly proud of your accomplishments and I thank you for enriching the Bioengineering environment with your invaluable contributions.” Keep reading below for a list of 2020 award recipients.

UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS:

Katharine Cocherl (BAS 2020), who completed a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Bioengineering along with a second major in Cinema and Media Studies, was awarded the Ben and Bertha Gomberg Kirsch Prize. This competitive award is decided by the SEAS faculty from among the Engineering undergraduate body and distinguishes a member of the B.A.S. senior class who “in applying the flexibility of the program, has created a personal academic experience involving the most creative use of the resources of the University.”

The Hugo Otto Wolf Memorial Prize, awarded to one or more members of each department’s senior class, distinguishes students who meet with great approval of the professors at large through “thoroughness and originality” in their work. This year, BE chose to share the award between Jacqueline Peng (BSE 2020) and Vera Lee (BSE 2020). In addition to their majors, Jacqueline also minored in Computer Science and is pursuing a Master’s degree in Data Science and Vera minored in the Engineering Entrepreneurship program and is pursuing a Master’s degree in Robotics.

The Herman P. Schwan Award is decided by the Bioengineering Department and honors a graduating senior who demonstrates the “highest standards of scholarship and academic achievement.” The 2020 recipient of the Schwan Award is Alexander Silva (BSE 2020) who is also graduating with a minor in Economics.

Every year, several BE students are recognized with Exceptional Service Awards for their outstanding service to the University and their larger communities. Our winners this year are Arielle Stern (BSE 2020 with a Math minor), Lauren McLeod (BSE 2020), and Evan Paregol (BSE 2020 with an Entrepreneurship minor). Arielle and Evan are also currently in the Accelerated Master’s program, in Data Science and Bioengineering, respectively.

The Student Leadership Award is given annually to a student in Bioengineering who has demonstrated, through a combination of academic performance, service, leadership, and personal qualities, that he or she will be a credit to the Department, the School, and the University. The 2020 recipient of this award is Katherine Simms (BSE 2020 with a minor in Chemistry).

BE also distinguishes a single lab group (four students) with the Albert Giandomenico Award which reflects their “teamwork, leadership, creativity, and knowledge applied to discovery-based learning in the laboratory.” This year’s group consists of Alisa Bhakta (2020 dual degree BSE in Bioengineering and BS in Economics from Wharton), Gabriel Desantis (BSE 2020 with a minor in Math), Lauren McLeod (BSE 2020), and Caroline Raquel (2020 dual degree BSE in Bioengineering and BS in Economics from Wharton).

Of this year’s Bioengineering Senior Design teams, three groups were chosen for special recognition:

  • RelieVR with Nicole Chiou (BSE 2020 with a minor in Computer Science), Gabe Desantis (BSE 2020 with a minor in Math), Ben Habermeyer BSE 2020 with a minor in Computer Science), and Vera Lee (BSE 2020 with an Engineering Entrepreneurship minor). RelieVR also won second place at the 2020 Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition and took home the Berkman Prize this past fall semester.
  • Relila with Alisa Bhakta (dual degree BSE and BS 2020), Alexander Connor (BSE 2020), Lauren McLeod (BSE 2020), Alexa Murray (BSE 2020 in Systems Science and Engineering), and Caroline Raquel (dual degree BSE and BS 2020). Relila also won second place at the annual M&T Program Lab Integration Awards summit.
  • SchistoSpot with Alec Bayliff (dual degree BAS and BS in Economics 2020), Bram Bruno (BAS 2020), Justin Swirbul (BSE 2020 in Computer Science), and Vishal Tien (BSE 2020). SchistoSpot also won the Pioneer Award at the annual Rothberg Catalyzer Makerthon.

Research for these projects was conducted in the George H. Stephenson Foundation Education Laboratory & Bio-Maker Space. The abstracts and presentation videos for each of the 2020 Senior Design Competition winners can be viewed on the BE Labs website.

Additionally, two graduating BAS seniors were awarded prizes for Best Senior Thesis:

  • Katharine Cocherl (BAS 2020 in Bioengineering and Cinema and Media Studies) for her paper “Bioethical Assessments of Film Portrayals of the Opioid Epidemic and Its Relationship with Public Discourse and Policy from the 1990s to Present.” “Insightful, original, and wide-reaching, her study of films related to the opioid epidemic in the U.S. the past 25 years was one of the best senior theses I have advised at Penn the past 15 years, ” says Katharine’s advisor Lance Wahlert, Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, Program Director of the Master of Bioethics
  • Gayatri Maria Schur (BAS 2020 with a minor in Music) for her paper titled “In Vivo Assessment of OXPHOS Capacity Using 3T CrCEST MRI in Adults and Children with Friedrich’s Ataxia.” Her advisor, Shana McCormack, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine, says that Gayatri’s “work has required that she communicate with collaborators across a variety of disciplines, and has also included interaction with the community of patients we study, and she has excelled here.”

GRADUATE AWARDS:

Master’s student Kayla Prezelski was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award for students. Kayla served as a TA for the Department of Bioengineering’s two-semester Senior Design courses (BE 495/496).

The following Master’s students were awarded recognition for their Outstanding Research:

  • Linghan Mei – advisor Andrew Tsourkas, Ph.D., Professor of Bioengineering
  • Ayush Aditya Pal – advisor Lukasz Bugaj, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Bioengineering
  • Robert Pierson – Independent Study advisor Brian Litt, M.D., Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Bioengineering, and Thesis advisors Insup Lee, Ph.D., Cecilia Fitler Moore of Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering, and James Weimer, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science
  • Tianjia Zhu – advisor Hao Huang, Ph.D., Research Associate Professor of Radiology in the Perelman School of Medicine

And finally, The Solomon R. Pollack Award for Excellence in Graduate Bioengineering is given annually to the most deserving Bioengineering graduate student who has successfully completed research that is original and recognized as being at the forefront of its field. This year, that award goes to Jonathan Beagan, Ph.D. who recently defended his thesis. Jon conducted his research in the 3D Epigenomics and Systems Neurobiology Lab overseen by Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Bioengineering. Research related to Jon’s award-winning doctoral thesis was recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In addition to this prestigious award, Jon was also named a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow during his time at Penn. Jon’s collaborations with Dr. Cremins have been covered several times on the BE blog. “Jon is an excellent researcher — simultaneously rigorous and creative,” says Dr. Cremins. “He has been a force in the lab — reading the literature voraciously, teaching other students, and executing/designing experiments meticulously. Beyond his natural talent, it is Jon’s personal qualities that make him stand out. He is a true leader, a team player, and one of the rare people that raises the bar for everyone around him.”

A full list of SEAS award descriptions and recipients can be found here.

Congratulations once again to the award winners and to all graduating students on an outstanding year of scholarship and service!

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Connecting Communities Impacted by COVID-19

Three Penn seniors combine their desire to help with their unique skill sets to create Corona Connects, an online platform that connects volunteers with organizations in need of support.

Developed by (from left) Steven Hamel from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Megan Kyne from the Wharton School, and Hadassah Raskas from the College of Arts & Sciences, Corona Connects bridges the gap between those looking for ways to help and organizations in need of support.

by Erica K. Brockmeier

With college campuses shut due to the novel coronavirus, many students with new-found time on their hands have found themselves asking, “What can I do to help?”

To connect people with organizations that need support, three students have combined their desire to help with the skills they’ve learned both inside and outside the classroom. Developed by Penn seniors Steven Hamel from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Megan Kyne from the Wharton School, and Hadassah Raskas from the College of Arts & Sciences, the online platform Corona Connects bridges the gap between people looking for ways to help and organizations looking for support.

After returning to her hometown of Silver Spring, Maryland, Raskas was eager to find some way to help but noticed that it was difficult to find opportunities online. With friends and colleagues voicing similar struggles, Raskas reached out to University of Maryland junior Elana Sichel and started putting together a list of organizations in need of help. Then, after reaching out on the Class of 2020 Facebook page about the project, Hamel, from Philadelphia, and Kyne, from Pittsburgh, offered their support to get an online platform up and running.

The team of students quickly realized that there was both a large number of individuals who wanted to find ways to help alongside an unprecedented level of need from numerous types of organizations. “We knew there was need, and we knew there was an availability of people, but the connection was missing, so we built Corona Connects to bridge this gap,” says Raskas.

Continue reading on Penn Today.

Steven Hamel graduated with his B.S.E. in Bioengineering and a Math minor in in 2020 and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Bioengineering.

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To Err is Human, to Learn, Divine

Researchers develop a new model for how the brain processes complex information: by striking a balance between accuracy and simplicity while making mistakes along the way.

By Erica K. Brockmeier

New research finds that the human brain detects patterns in complex networks by striking a balance between simplicity and complexity, much like how a pointillist painting can be viewed up close to see the finer details or from a distance to see its overall structure.

The human brain is a highly advanced information processor composed of more than 86 billion neurons. Humans are adept at recognizing patterns from complex networks, such as languages, without any formal instruction. Previously, cognitive scientists tried to explain this ability by depicting the brain as a highly optimized computer, but there is now discussion among neuroscientists that this model might not accurately reflect how the brain works.

Now, Penn researchers have developed a different model for how the brain interprets patterns from complex networks. Published in Nature Communications, this new model shows that the ability to detect patterns stems in part from the brain’s goal to represent things in the simplest way possible. Their model depicts the brain as constantly balancing accuracy with simplicity when making decisions. The work was conducted by physics Ph.D. student Christopher Lynn, neuroscience Ph.D. student Ari Kahn, and Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering.

This new model is built upon the idea that people make mistakes while trying to make sense of patterns, and these errors are essential to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. “If you look at a pointillist painting up close, you can correctly identify every dot. If you step back 20 feet, the details get fuzzy, but you’ll gain a better sense of the overall structure,” says Lynn.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers ran a set of experiments similar to a previous study by Kahn. That study found that when participants were shown repeating elements in a sequence, such as A-B-C-B, etc., they were automatically sensitive to certain patterns without being explicitly aware that the patterns existed. “If you experience a sequence of information, such as listening to speech, you can pick up on certain statistics between elements without being aware of what those statistics are,” says Kahn.

To understand how the brain automatically understands such complex associations within sequences, 360 study participants were shown a computer screen with five gray squares corresponding to five keys on a keyboard. As two of the five squares changed from gray to red, the participants had to strike the computer keys that corresponded to the changing squares. For the participants, the pattern of color-changing squares was random, but the sequences were actually generated using two kinds of networks.

The researchers found that the structure of the network impacted how quickly the participants could respond to the stimuli, an indication of their expectations of the underlying patterns. Responses were quicker when participants were shown sequences that were generated using a modular network compared to sequences coming from a lattice network.

Continue reading on Penn Today.

This paper was also profiled on the website Big Think.