Dani Bassett Elected an American Physical Society Fellow

Dani Bassett, Ph.D.

Dani S. Bassett,  J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, has been elected a 2021 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) “for significant contributions to the network modeling of the human brain, including dynamical changes caused by evolution, learning, aging, and disease.”

The prestigious APS Fellowship Program signifies recognition by one’s professional peers. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the APS membership is recognized with this distinct honor. Bassett’s election and groundbreaking work in biological physics and network science will be recognized through presentation of a certificate at the APS March Meeting.

Bassett is a pioneer in the field of network neuroscience, an emerging subfield which incorporates elements of mathematics, physics,  biology and systems engineering to better understand how the overall shape of connections between individual neurons influences cognitive traits. They lead the Complex Systems lab which tackles problems at the intersection of science, engineering, and medicine using systems-level approaches, exploring fields such as curiosity, dynamic networks in neuroscience, and psychiatric disease.

Bassett recently collaborated with Penn artist-in-residence Rebecca Kamen and other scholars on an interdisciplinary art exhibit on the creative process in art and science at the Katzen Art Center at American University. They have also published research modeling different types of curiosity and exploring gender-based citation bias in neuroscience publishing.

“I’m thrilled and humbled to receive this honor from the American Physical Society,” says Bassett. “I am indebted to the many fantastic mentees, colleagues, and mentors that have made my time in science such an exciting adventure. Thank you.”

Read more stories about Bassett’s research here.

Reimagining Scientific Discovery Through the Lens of an Artist

by Erica K. Brockmeier

Rebecca Kamen, Penn artist-in-residence and visiting scholar, has a new exhibition titled “Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery” at American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center that explores curiosity and the creative process across art and science. (Image: Greg Staley)

Rebecca Kamen, Penn artist-in-residence and visiting scholar, has long been interested in science and the natural world. As a Philadelphia native and an artist with a 40-plus-year career, her intersectional work sheds light on the process of scientific discovery and its connections to art, with previous exhibitions that celebrate Apollo 11’s “spirit of exploration and discovery” to new representations of the periodic table of elements.

Now, in her latest exhibition, Kamen has created a series of pieces that highlight how the creative processes in art and science are interconnected. In “Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery,” Kamen chronicles her own artistic process while providing a space for self-reflection that enables viewers to see the relationship between science, art, and their own creativity.

The exhibit, on display at the Katzen Art Center at American University, was inspired by the work of Penn professor Dani Bassett and American University professor Perry Zurn, the exhibit’s faculty sponsor. The culmination of three years of work, “Reveal” features collaborations with a wide range of scientists, including philosophers at American University, microscopists at the National Institutes of Health studying SARS-CoV-2 , and researchers in Penn’s Complex Systems Lab and the Addiction, Health, and Adolescence (AHA!) Lab.

Continue reading at Penn Today.

Dani S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She also has appointments in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and the departments of Neurology and Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn.

Rebecca Kamen is a visiting scholar and artist-in-residence in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

David Lydon-Staley is an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn and was formerly a postdoc in the Bassett lab.

Dale Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Penn’s Neuroscience Graduate Group.

“Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery,” presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art and curated by Sarah Tanguy, is on display at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., until Dec. 12.

The exhbition catalog, which includes an essay on “Radicle Curiosity” by Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett, can be viewed online.

Annenberg and Penn Bioengineering Research into Communication Citation Bias

Photo Credit: Debby Hudson / Unsplash

Women are frequently under-cited in academia, and the field of communication is no exception, according to research from the Annenberg School for Communication. The study, entitled “Gendered Citation Practices in the Field of Communication,” was published in Annals of the International Communication Association.

A new study from the Addiction, Health, & Adolescence (AHA!) Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that men are over-cited and women are under-cited in the field of Communication. The researchers’ findings indicate that this problem is most persistent in papers authored by men.

“Despite known limitations in their use as proxies for research quality, we often turn to citations as a way to measure the impact of someone’s research,” says Professor David Lydon-Staley, “so it matters for individual researchers if one group is being consistently under-cited relative to another group. But it also matters for the field in the sense that if people are not citing women as much as men, then we’re building the field on the work of men and not the work of women. Our field should be representative of all of the excellent research that is being undertaken, and not just that of one group.”

The AHA! Lab is led by David Lydon-Staley, Assistant Professor of Communication and former postdoc in the Complex Systems lab of Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Bassett and Bassett Lab members Dale Zhou and Jennifer Stiso, graduate students in the Perelman School of Medicine, also contributed to the study.

Read “Women are Under-cited and Men are Over-cited in Communication” in Annenberg School for Communication News.

“This is What a Data Scientist Looks Like”

Speakers at the second annual Women in Data Science @ Penn Conference.

Last month, the second annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) @ Penn Conference virtually gathered nearly 500 registrants to participate in a week’s worth of academic and industry talks, live speaker Q&A sessions, and networking opportunities.

Hosted by Penn Engineering, Analytics at WhartonWharton Customer Analytics and Wharton’s Statistics Department, the conference’s theme — “This is What a Data Scientist Looks Like” – emphasized the depth, breadth, and diversity of data science, both in terms of the subjects the field covers and the people who enter it.

Following welcoming remarks from Erika James, Dean of the Wharton School, and Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering, the conference began with a keynote address from President of Microsoft US and Wharton alumna Kate Johnson.

Conference sessions continued throughout the week, featuring panels of academic data scientists from around Penn and beyond, industry leaders from IKEA Digital, Facebook and Poshmark, and lightning talks from students speakers who presented their data science research.

All of the conference’s sessions are now available on YouTube and the 2021 WiDS Conference Recap, including a talk titled “How Humans Build Models for the World” by Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering.

Read more about the conference at Wharton Stories: “How Women in Data Science Rise to the Top.

Originally posted in Penn Engineering Today.

‘As More Women Enter Science, It’s Time to Redefine Mentorship’

 

Danielle Bassett, Ph.D.

Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, investigates how the shape of networks impact the phenomena that arises from them. Much of that research is focused on networks of neurons, and how the different ways they are wired together in different people can influence their mental traits, such as memory or executive function.

Bassett is also interested in networks of people, however, as the shapes of those networks can have a major impact on a society’s traits. Last year, she and her colleagues published a study that investigated the network of citations neuroscience researchers produced in the course of their work, demonstrating a systemic gender bias that left women underrepresented in the literature.

Recently, Bassett spoke with WIRED’s Grace Huckins about the big-picture changes that must take place within academia for it to become truly equitable.

When a group of researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi published a paper in Nature Communications last fall suggesting that young women scientists should seek out men as mentors, the backlash was swift and vociferous. Countless scientists, many of them women, registered their indignation on Twitter—some even penning open letters and their own preprints in response. The original paper had found that female junior scientists who authored papers with male senior scientists saw their papers cited at higher rates. But a number of critics contested the assertion that this result established a link between male mentors and career performance. Scientists routinely coauthor articles with people who are not their mentors, they argued, and citation rates are just one metric of achievement. In response to these criticisms, the authors eventually retracted their paper. (They declined to comment to WIRED.)

But the paper had already stirred up a broader discussion about gender and mentorship in academia. For Danielle Bassett, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the methodological concerns that prompted the paper’s retraction were far from its worst sin. She herself has researched citation practices and found that, in neuroscience, papers with male senior authors are cited at a disproportionately high rate—primarily because other male scientists preferentially cite them. To suggest that young women should therefore try to author papers with men is, she believes, a grave error. “That was a problem in assigning blame,” she says. “The onus is on us to create a scientific culture that lets students choose a mentor that’s right for them.”

Continue reading Grace Huckins’s ‘As More Women Enter Science, It’s Time to Redefine Mentorship‘ at WIRED.

Originally posted in Penn Engineering Today.

Studying ‘Hunters and Busybodies,’ Penn and American University Researchers Measure Different Types of Curiosity

by Melissa Pappas

Knowledge networks were created as participants browsed Wikipedia, where pages became nodes and relatedness between pages became edges. Two diverging styles emerged — “the busybody” and “the hunter.” (Illustrations by Melissa Pappas)

Curiosity has been found to play a role in our learning and emotional well-being, but due to the open-ended nature of how curiosity is actually practiced, measuring it is challenging. Psychological studies have attempted to gauge participants’ curiosity through their engagement in specific activities, such as asking questions, playing trivia games, and gossiping. However, such methods focus on quantifying a person’s curiosity rather than understanding the different ways it can be expressed.

Efforts to better understand what curiosity actually looks like for different people have underappreciated roots in the field of philosophy. Varying styles have been described with loose archetypes, like “hunter” and “busybody” — evocative, but hard to objectively measure when it comes to studying how people collect new information.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University, uses Wikipedia browsing as a method for describing curiosity styles. Using a branch of mathematics known as graph theory, their analysis of curiosity opens doors for using it as a tool to improve learning and life satisfaction.

The interdisciplinary study, published in Nature Human Behavior, was undertaken by Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Penn Engineering’s Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, David Lydon-Staley, then a post-doctoral fellow in her lab, now an assistant professor in the Annenberg School of Communication, two members of Bassett’s Complex Systems Lab, graduate student Dale Zhou and postdoctoral fellow Ann Sizemore Blevins, and Perry Zurn, assistant professor from American University’s Department of Philosophy.

“The reason this paper exists is because of the participation of many people from different fields,” says Lydon-Staley. “Perry has been researching curiosity in novel ways that show the spectrum of curious practice and Dani has been using networks to describe form and function in many different systems. My background in human behavior allowed me to design and conduct a study linking the styles of curiosity to a measurable activity: Wikipedia searches.”

Zurn’s research on how different people express curiosity provided a framework for the study.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Danielle Bassett and Jason Burdick are Among World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers

Danielle Bassett and Jason Burdick
Danielle Bassett and Jason Burdick

The nature of scientific progress is often summarized by the Isaac Newton quotation, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Each new study draws on dozens of earlier ones, forming a chain of knowledge stretching back to Newton and the scientific giants his work referenced.

Scientific publishing and referencing has become more formal since Newton’s time, with databases of citations allowing for sophisticated quantitative analyses of that flow of information between researchers.

The Institute for Scientific Information and the Web of Science Group provide a yearly snapshot of this flow, publishing a list of the researchers who are in the top 1 percent of their respective fields when it comes to the number of times their work has been cited.

Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, and Jason Burdick, Robert D. Bent Professor in the department of Bioengineering, are among the 6,389 researchers named to the 2020 list.

Bassett is a pioneer in the field of network neuroscience, which incorporates elements of mathematics, physics,  biology and systems engineering to better understand how the overall shape of connections between individual neurons influences cognitive traits. Burdick is an expert in tissue engineering and the design of biomaterials for regenerative medicine; by precisely tailoring the microenvironment within these materials, they can influence stem cell differentiation or trigger the release of therapeutics.

Bassett and Burdick were named to the Web of Science’s 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list as well.

Originally posted in Penn Engineering Today.

Postdoctoral Fellow Linden Parkes Wins BBRF Young Investigator Grant

Linden Parkes, PhD

The Department of Bioengineering at Penn is thrilled to congratulate Linden Parkes on receiving a Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator Grant for 2021-2022. This grant will support Parkes’ continued postdoctoral research under the supervision of Danielle S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS),  Theodore D. Satterthwaite, Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM), and Raquel E. Gur, the Karl and Linda Rickels Professor of Psychiatry in PSOM.

Originally from Australia, Parkes did his undergraduate B.Sc. (Hons.) in Psychology and Psychophysiology at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University (also in Melbourne) under the supervision of Murat Yucel, Professor of Psychology, Alex Fornito, Professor of Psychology, and Ben Fulcher, Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. After finishing his doctorate, Parkes moved to Philadelphia to take up a position as a postdoctoral fellow in Danielle Bassett’s Complex Systems Lab.

Parkes will use the BBRF’s support to continue his research examining the link between the symptoms of mental illness and the brain. In particular, he seeks to uncover how individual patterns of abnormal neurodevelopment link to, and predict, the emergence of psychosis symptoms through childhood and adolescence using longitudinal data. In turn, Parkes’ work will discover prognostic biomarkers for the psychosis spectrum that will help inform clinical outcome tracking.

“I am honored to have been selected for a Young Investigator Grant from the BBRF this year,” Parkes says. “This award will support me to conduct research that I believe will make real inroads into understanding the pathways that link abnormalities in neurodevelopment to the symptoms of psychosis. I feel grateful for the opportunity to complete my postdoctoral training at Penn. Penn has connected me with wonderful people who I’m sure will be lifelong mentors, colleagues, and peers.”

The BBRF Young Investigator Grants are valued at more than $10.3 million and are awarded annually to 150 of the world’s most promising young scientists to support the work of early career investigators with innovative ideas for groundbreaking neurobiological research seeking to identify causes, improve treatments, and develop prevention strategies for psychiatric disorders.

Read more about the BBRF 2020 Young Investigators here.

Danielle Bassett on ‘A Radical New Model of the Brain’

In a ‘Wired’ feature, Bassett helps explain the growing field of network neuroscience and how the form and function of the brain are connected.

Danielle Bassett, Ph.D.

Early attempts to understand how the brain works included the pseudoscience of phrenology, which theorized that various mental functions could be determined through the shape of the skull. While those theories have long been debunked, modern neuroscience has shown a kernel of truth to them: those functions are highly localized to different regions of the brain.

Now, Danielle Bassett, Professor of J. Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, is pioneering a new subfield that goes even deeper into the connection between the brain’s form and function: network neuroscience.

In a recent feature article in Wired, Bassett explains the concepts behind this new subfield. While prior understanding has long relied on the idea that certain areas of the brain control certain functions, Bassett and other network neuroscientists are using advances in imaging and machine learning to reveal the role the connections between those areas play.

For Bassett, one of the first indicators that these connections mattered more than previously realized was the shape of the neurons themselves.

Speaking with Wired’s Grace Huckins, Bassett says:

“Neurons are not spherical — neurons have a cell body, and then they have this long tail that allows them to connect to many other cells. You can even look at the morphology of the neuron and say, ‘Oh, well, connectivity has to matter. Otherwise, it wouldn’t look like this.’”

Read more about Bassett and the field of network neuroscience in Wired.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering blog.

‘For Neurodegeneration, a Different Way to Slice the Pie’

Danielle Bassett, Ph.D.

Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, has been called the “doyenne of network neuroscience.” The burgeoning field applies insights from the field of network science, which studies how the structure of networks relate to their performance, to the billions of neuronal connections that make up the brain.

Much of Basset’s research draws on mathematical and engineering principles to better understand how mental traits arise, but also applies them more broadly to other challenges in neuroscience.

In her latest paper, “Defining and predicting transdiagnostic categories of neurodegenerative disease,” published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, Bassett collaborated with the Perelman School of Medicine’s Virginia Man-Yee Lee and John Trojanowski to provide a new perspective on the misfolded proteins associated with those diseases.

The researchers used machine learning techniques to create a new classification system for neurodegenerative diseases, one which may redraw the boundaries between them and help explain clinical differences in patients who received the same diagnoses.

BioWorld’s Anette Breindl spoke with Bassett about the team’s findings.

Now, investigators have developed a new approach to classifying neurodegenerative disorders that used the overall patterns of protein aggregation, rather than specific proteins, to define six clusters of patients that crossed traditional diagnostic categories.

“We find that perhaps the way that clinicians have been diagnosing these disorders… is not necessarily the way these disorders work,” Danielle Bassett told BioWorld. “The way we’ve been trying to carve nature at joints is not the way that nature has joints. The joints are elsewhere.”

Continue reading Breindl’s article, “For neurodegeneration, a different way to slice the pie,” at BioWorld.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering blog. Media contact Evan Lerner.