Category: News

Congratulations Mert!!!!

On Thursday December 11 Alican Demir presented his PhD dissertation research to a packed seminar room at Johns Hopkins. Alican joined the lab as a Freshman in 2013, performed MSE thesis research in the lab, worked as a research specialist for a few years, and then completed his PhD, so his contributions have been monumental in shaping the LIMBS laboratory over the years. Congratulations Alican!

PhD candidate Mustafa Mert Ankarali has been selected to join the prestigious Siebel Scholars Class of 2015. This scholarship is awarded annually for academic excellence and demonstrated leadership to 85 top students from world’s leading graduate schools. Mert is the first Siebel Scholar from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at JHU.

Congratulations Shahin!!!

 

 

LIMBS Lab Postdoc Sarah Stamper was awarded the International Society for Neuroethology’s Young Investigator Award. This prestigious award “… recognizes … early post-doctoral fellows who have shown outstanding promise and have already made a significant research contribution in neuroethology.” She will report her work in a special lecture at the ISN’s 2014 meeting in July in Sapporo, Japan.

LIMBS Lab postdoc Sarah Stamper placed third in the poster competition for the 1st Annual Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Retreat on May 16, 2014. Sarah’s poster was on understanding communication and movement in groups of fish that live along the Amazon basin and use electrical signals for sensing.

LIMBS Lab members past and present were extremely well represented at the 2014 Convocation Awards!

• Edward “Ned” Samson won the James Bell award for outstanding research and scholarly achievement in Mechanical Engineering.
• Samuel Frishman and Alexander Spinos were co-winners of the Robert George Gerstmyer awards, recognizing outstanding undergraduate achievement in Mechanical Engineering.
• Dongsuk Shin  won the Charles A. Miller award, which recognizes outstanding academic achievement by an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering.
• Gowtham Garimella – graduate winners of the Creel Family Teaching Assistant award, recognizing the best teaching assistants in Mechanical Engineering.

Mert Ankarali’s paper was featured on the cover of the Journal of Neurophysiology:

M. Mert Ankaralı, H. Tutkun Şen, Avik De, Allison M. Okamura, and Noah J. Cowan. “Haptic feedback enhances rhythmic motor control by reducing variability, not improving convergence rate”. J Neurophysiol, 111(6):1286-1299, 2014. [pdf] [Download cover illustration]

It was also picked up in the news:

• Huffington Post: “What Juggling Is Teaching Scientists About Running” 
• Baltimore Sun: “Juggling study leads to new revelations about human movement”
• Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOulwW6b66Q

Congratulations, Manu!!

Eva Siehmann won the Lorenz-Wegen award for best thesis at her university, Westfälischen Hochschule. She did her thesis project at the LIMBS lab during Spring-Summer 2013.

 

In her thesis, Eva Siehmann focused on decoding the neural circuitry for extracting features called ‘envelopes’, which are present in a lot of sensory signals. Her work was specifically on envelope extraction in the electrosensory system of weakly electric fish. Eva attempted to deduce, through a task-level experiment, whether the nonlinear mechanism in question is half-wave or full-wave rectifier with a low-pass filter following it.