You (Lilian) Cheng

You (Lilian) Cheng

Research Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School

Host CNLM Panel ‘How Addiction Hijacks the Brain’

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This evening, I hosted the CNLM ambassador’s panel “How Addiction Hijacks the Brain: What Animal Models Can Tell Us About the Neurobiology of Drugs of Abuse”. This panel features four UCI addiction experts Dr. Christie Fowler, Dr. Ariana Nelson, Dr. Jessica Childs, and PhD candidate Mitchell Farrell. This is the second panel hosted by CNLM Adult Outreach Committee and we have over 60 attendees from the Irvine community. Although the audience size in summer is smaller than during the school year, I really enjoyed facilitating the panel discussion, learned about neural mechanisms underlying drug addiction, and was deeply inspired by scientists who are determined to devote their lifelong career to improving people’s mental health. Please check out this post for more detals.

Learning from our last panel on “sleep and mental health”, we improved question organization and changed our free-answer question mode to a semi-directed question style. The semi-directed question mode seems to work more effectively this time as we managed to go over many questions within the 1.5 hour. This hosting experience is also a great learning process for me. I gained a new perspective in thinking about academic activities: how to get involved in a discussion while I am not a scientist in that specific sub-discipline (my field is spatial neuroscience, which is very different from drug abuse).

This experience also boosted my knowledge back-up as a teacher. Interestingly, just around two weeks ago, I gave a mini-lecture in my Psychology Fundamental class on how to use classical conditioning to explain why people got overdose easily in a new environment. I will have more to share with my students in the future if I were to teach related topic again. How nice :)

All panelists, organizers, and moderators

Here are some relevant resources:

SAMHSA’s National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357) https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline

Quit smoking: https://smokefree.gov

Prevent Overdose on Opioids - Naloxone for All: https://www.naloxoneforall.org

Suicide Prevention Hotline: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org

Alcoholics Anonymous Orange County: https://oc-aa.org

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Present at AAIC 2023

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This week, I attended the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) by presenting a poster “Predicting Brain Amyloid Status Using the NIH Toolbox for Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function” (virtually by me, in person in Armsterdam, NL by my co-author Prof. Hiroko Dodge). This is my first presentation at Alzheimer’s conference and hope it’s a good start.

New paper on MRI analysis published in PNAS

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My co-authored new paper regarding MRI analyses was accepted by PNAS. The research introduced SynthSeg+, an AI segmentation suite that provides robust analysis on clinical MRI scans. The tool is available on Freesurfer.

Attend BrightFocus Alzheimer’s Fast Track Workshop and Present at Sfn 2022 in San Diego

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This month, I attended the BrightFocus AD Fast Track 2022 workshop in San Diego (Thanks to the support of BrightFocus Travel Diversity Fellowship). The immersive workshop gave me a good head start on cutting-edge research related to Alzheimer’s dementia. Afterwards, I attended Sfn 2022 and gave a talk titled “Evidence for a distributed head direction and travel trajectory system in the human brain during active navigation” at the nanosymposium “Memory Encoding and Spatial Navigation” on Wednesday afternoon (Nov. 16).