It is almost impossible to overstate how monumental a development that would be and how it would answer the prayers of millions.

Though science isn’t there yet, a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience spearheaded by USC Davis School of Gerontology researchers offers a tantalizing glimpse of potential solutions.

“Our data suggests the possibility of drugs that can prevent and treat Alzheimer’s,” said lead author, professor and lab principal Christian Pike of USC Davis. “It’s just mouse data but extremely encouraging mouse data.”

The team studied the effects of a class of drugs called TSPO ligands on male mice that were genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease, known as 3xTg-AD mice. Because a key mechanism of TSPO ligands is to increase production of steroid hormones, it was important to ensure that the mice had low levels of testosterone and related hormones before treatment. Younger mice were castrated while, in older mice, the decrease occurred as a normal consequence of aging.

“We looked at the effects of TSPO ligands in young adult mice when pathology was at an early stage and in aged mice when pathology was quite severe,” Pike said. “TSPO ligands reduced measures of pathology and improved behavior at both ages.”

The most surprising finding for Pike and his team was the effect of TSPO ligands in the aged mice. Four treatments — one per week over four weeks — in aged 3xTg-AD mice resulted in significant lowering of Alzheimer’s-related pathology and improvements in memory behavior. This finding suggested the possibility that TSPO ligands can reverse components of Alzheimer’s and thus have the potential to be useful in treatment.

For humans, these findings may indeed be quite significant.

“TSPO ligands are currently used in humans in certain types of neuroimaging. Newer TSPO ligands are at the clinical trials stage of development for treatment of anxiety and other conditions,” Pike said. “There is a strong possibility that TSPO ligands similar to the ones used in our study could be evaluated for therapeutic efficacy in Alzheimer’s patients within the next few years.”

In light of the findings, the team will next focus on understanding how TSPO ligands reduce Alzheimer’s pathology. Building on the established knowledge that TSPO ligands can act protectively by reducing inflammation, shielding nerve cells from injury and increasing the production of neuroactive hormones in the brain, the team will study which of these actions is the most significant in fighting Alzheimer’s so it can develop newer TSPO ligands accordingly.

While Pike and his team acknowledged that the findings represent an exciting possibility, the researchers also stressed that it is by no means a given.

“From the optimistic perspective, our data provide very promising findings with tangible potential benefits for both the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s,” Pike said. “On the pessimistic side, research scientists have developed many interventions that cured Alzheimer’s in mice but have failed to show significant benefits in humans. A critical direction we are currently pursuing is successfully translating these findings into humans.”

Co-authors of the study were Anna Barron (former USC Davis postdoctoral student and Molecular Imaging Center, National Institute of Radiological Sciences, Japan); Luis Garcia Segura (Instituto Cajal, Spain); Donatella Caruso and Roberto Melcangi (Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences, Centre of Excellence on Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of Milan); and Anusha Jayaraman and Joo Lee (USC Davis).

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health in support of the USC Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, directed by Helena Chui, professor of neurology and gerontology at USC.

“This is an important new program to prepare students to address one of the grand engineering challenges of the coming decades,” said John O’Brien, executive vice dean for engineering at USC Viterbi.

The cybersecurity degree will focus on the fundamentals of developing, engineering and operating secure information systems. The aim of the program is to provide students the necessary tools to administer environments that require high levels of information security. Students will take courses in secure operating systems and applications, secure networking, digital forensics, cryptography and key management. In addition, the curriculum is designed to give students an understanding of the security policy development.

“The launch of the Master of Cybersecurity program is very timely, as there is a rapidly growing demand for professionals in this area,” said Herb Schorr, vice dean for engineering and director emeritus of USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute. “Graduates of this program will have the ability to apply their knowledge in a variety of industry sectors, including defense, finance, oil and gas, entertainment, medicine and any other business which has information they value in the digital world.”

According to a recent report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, it is projected that by 2015, the United States will need 700,000 new cybersecurity professionals. In addition, the publication Network World called cybersecurity the hottest job in information technology.

“The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is in a strong position to offer this program, as USC is a National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security Center of Academic Excellence in Research,” Schorr said. “Through interaction with public and private stakeholders, we believe we have developed a curriculum that will prepare students to compete for high-paying jobs with anyone in the nation and to contribute to the field immediately after graduation.”

Students who do not live in the Los Angeles area will have the opportunity to take the same courses in cybersecurity online. DEN@Viterbi, ranked as the top online engineering delivery program by U.S. News & World Report, delivers campus courses via webcast, using the latest technology to provide students a seamless experience.

The study, which appeared in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that mice lost 85 percent of their hair if they received radiation therapy in the morning, compared to a 17-percent loss when treatment occurred in the evening.

Researchers from USC, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), worked out the precise timing of the hair circadian clock as well as uncovered the biology behind the clockwork — the molecules that tell hair when to grow and when to repair damage. The researchers then tested the clock using radiotherapy.

“These findings are particularly exciting because they present a significant step toward developing new radiation therapy protocols that include minimizing negative side effects on normal tissues, such as hair or bone marrow, while maintaining the desired effects on cancer cells,” said the study’s first author Maksim Plikus, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at USC and now an assistant professor of developmental and cell biology at UCI. “We will now apply our findings to design novel circadian rhythm-based approaches to cancer therapy.”

The scientists can’t say their findings will directly translate to human cancer therapy because they haven’t yet studied that possibility. But they say it is becoming increasingly clear that body organs and tissues have their own circadian clocks that, when understood, could be used to time drug therapy for maximum benefit.

“This suggests that delivering a drug to an organ while it is largely inactive is not a good idea. You could do more damage to the organ than when it is awake, repairing and restoring itself,” said the study’s co-lead investigator, Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory and an expert on circadian rhythm. “If you know when an organ is mending itself, you might be able to deliver more potent doses of a drug or therapy. That might offer a better outcome while minimizing side effects.”

Cheng-Ming Chuong, professor of pathology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the study’s co-lead investigator, and Plikus are experts on hair regeneration. Panda uses genetic, genomics and biochemical approaches to identify genes under circadian regulation in different organs and to understand the mechanism of such regulation. They teamed together to find and then take apart the mouse hair circadian clock. It was a long and difficult study, according to Chuong.

“Hair is a very complicated organ, featuring different types of cells going through different stages in the life cycle in a very tiny space,” he said. “We found that hair in mice grows fast in the morning and slows down at night, engaging a very powerful clock.”

Every time hair cells divide, they pick up DNA damage that needs to be repaired. The scientists discovered that mice hair cells repair the damage primarily in the evening.

Radiotherapy damages DNA in cells that divide rapidly, which is why it is used against growing cancer cells. That means DNA damage to hair cells from radiotherapy delivered in the morning is not repaired until the evening, leading to hair loss. Damage from radiotherapy at night, however, is minimized because hair cells, already in the process of repairing DNA, can quickly heal.

“While we don’t yet know if human hair follows that same clock we found in mice hair, it is true that facial hair in men grows during the day, resulting in the proverbial 5 o’clock shadow. There is no 5 a.m. shadow if you shave at night,” Panda said.

Scientists know for certain that other organs, such as the liver, use a circadian clock, and they suspect that all human tissue is similarly regulated, though the clocks may be timed differently. According to Chuong and colleagues, the clinical implications for these various internal clocks may go beyond timing of drug therapy.

“For example, some researchers suspect that obesity and diabetes occur when an organ or organs — perhaps the liver or stomach or pancreas — should be sleeping, but is awoken by food that needs to be processed,” Panda said.

Other contributing authors on the study were Damon de la Cruz from USC, Christopher Vollmers and Amandine Chaix from Salk, and Raul Ramos from UCI.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers AR42177, AR47364, DK091618 and P30 CA014195), The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, The Charles A. Dana Foundation, the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation.

Because he had a difficult time spelling and handwriting, one teacher advised him not to go to college.

How would that ninth-grade teacher feel today to learn that Harris has not only earned his PhD but has made breakthrough discoveries while working in a microbiology laboratory at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences?

“I was such a slow test taker,” Harris recalled. “Handwritten essay tests were the worst.”

Then he was diagnosed with dysgraphia — a learning disability that affects handwriting and spelling. He also had problems focusing and was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD).

“It’s a really awkward moment, when everyone is finished with their test and you’re still sitting there,” Harris said. “You start wondering, ‘Do I really belong in the classroom?’ ”

The answer was yes. All that Harris needed was a little extra time on tests. When that happened, he began to excel. It also helped when he received photocopied notes from classmates.

He was the sole student in his school’s learning disability program who was taking advanced placement (AP) calculus and physics. Oftentimes his teachers were confused. “What is a student with disabilities doing taking AP courses?” they asked.

During his spare time, he began making films and was good at it. He met a student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, who encouraged him to go to film school. Harris got pumped up about that idea and entered USC as a film major.

Growing up in Santa Clarita, Calif., Harris took a summer internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., for the purpose of making a documentary about scientists exploring life on Mars.

The more he watched and interviewed scientists, the more he became intrigued with science.

“You can see it in their eyes,” Harris said. “They love what they do and can’t wait to get to work in the morning.”

By the end of the summer he began to work in the laboratory of Kenneth Nealson — then a professor at the California Institute of Technology — and became hooked on research.

Harris looked carefully for the right college. Though he was accepted to several top colleges, he felt that USC was the place where he could learn about both science and filmmaking.

After doing his research, he learned that USC was also among the nation’s best universities for students with disabilities. Receiving accommodations he needed — small but significant things like a little extra time on tests — Harris excelled. A visual learner, Harris majored in biophysics and cinema.

At the time Harris added the biophysics major, Nealson took a position as holder of the USC Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of earth sciences and biological sciences at USC Dornsife. Harris eventually worked in Nealson’s laboratory as an undergraduate and was then invited to apply to graduate school. After earning his bachelor’s degrees in cinema and biophysics, he was honored to learn that he was accepted to the PhD program in biological science.

“It’s very rare to find anyone else with a disability in a PhD program,” Nealson noted.

At USC Dornsife, Harris discovered and characterized a new bacterial sensing mechanism. He was the lead author on several scientific papers, including an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Biochemical Journal. All of his research papers are accompanied by online videos, which help readers visualize the results from experiments.

“Film provides a way to communicate your findings to the public — even scientists want to see your work visually,” he said.

At Harris’ PhD hooding ceremony on May 16, Nealson was at his side. Back in January, Harris’ strongest advocate, his father, Norman Harris, a scientist himself, died suddenly after a stroke.

“My dad wanted to see me receive my PhD; it was a really big deal for him,” Harris said. “I definitely have been influenced by him and that will be very lasting in my life.”

His father and his mentors showed him that science is an opportunity for creativity and a way to make a positive mark in the world. Struggling through school made Harris aware of other students’ challenges, especially those who feel they don’t fit into the academic setting.

“I want to give these students a chance to do research projects in a lab,” he said.

While pursuing his PhD, Harris mentored high school students in his laboratory and helped them to develop their own research projects.

This summer, Harris is headed to France, where he will conduct research for a company seeking a new method to enhance oil recovery with the use of microbes. He has also been offered a postdoctorate position in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Science is an opportunity to discover something new that might help everyone,” he said. “It’s a chance to make a difference.”

Reichardt won a five-year $507,000 grant for research on procedures for quantum computation. The award supports the early career development of talented up-and-coming scholars.

“We are delighted by Ben Reichardt’s NSF Career Award since it recognizes his significant contributions to quantum computing,” said Sandeep Gupta, chair of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems. “More importantly, this award will support Ben’s ongoing research that we anticipate to dramatically improve the understanding of quantum entanglement and to produce powerful protocols for quantum key distribution that will provide unprecedented levels of security in communications.”

Reichardt and his team are designing new algorithms that would allow researchers to find better and fuller ways to leverage quantum computing’s potential. His work, he said, could potentially improve processing and memory storage.

In addition, Reichardt is working on infrastructure that would, in principal, allow for more secure communication via quantum key distribution systems. It would do so by eliminating side-channel attacks. Such enhancements would lead to better and more secure satellite communication, among other benefits.

Reichardt said he enjoys the challenges of working in quantum computing because of the many research possibilities in the nascent and wide-open field.

“I don’t know exactly how long before quantum computers are built, but it seems like a really good time to be working on them,” Reichardt said.

He also likes that his quantum computing work combines math, computer science, electrical engineering and physics, allowing him to cross traditional academic boundaries and work with academics in a variety of disciplines. “I get bored easily,” Reichardt said with a laugh.

A native of San Francisco, Reichardt earned a Bachelor of Science in math at Stanford University in 2001 and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology’s Institute for Quantum Information from 2006 to 2008.

Reichardt then headed north to Canada, where he became an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. After nearly four years there, Reichardt joined USC in early 2012.

He said working at USC has given him the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded scholars working on quantum computing.

“And unlike in Canada, I can go running outside every day here in Southern California,” Reichardt quipped.

The presentation and panel discussion with this policy-working group included lead representation from the U.S. Department of State, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Security Staff, among other agencies. Attendees explored successful models of strategic partnerships and discussed challenges of creation, facilitation and sustainability.

“Cross-sector partnerships have become essential to philanthropy as well as government,” said Jim Thompson, director for partnerships and innovation at the National Security Staff for the White House. “Where government agencies have created offices of strategic partnerships, we have seen not only an increase in the number of partnerships formed but a maturation of the planning and execution of partnerships.”

The center has examined the growing number of “philanthropic liaisons” that have been created at the local and state levels, as well as at the various federal agencies, that serve as bridges between philanthropy and government.

Last year, the center convened a roundtable on the topic, which featured more than 40 practitioners and researchers from across the country for a high-level inter-sectoral conversation about the strategic interplay of foundations and government in solving public problems. The conversation continued in a session at the 2012 Annual Conference of the Council on Foundations in Los Angeles.

The interviews and outcomes of the roundtable contributed to a 2012 report that examined the emergence of new structures engaging partners to work together to address public problems.

“As both philanthropy and government seek to maximize their impact, they are increasingly looking to leverage each other’s assets more systematically to address public problems,” said James Ferris, director of the center.

The report, which was researched and presented by Ferris and the center’s associate director Nicholas Williams, found that these new offices can catalyze and accelerate the development of effective partnerships between government and philanthropy and lower barriers as well as reduce costs and risks by creating an infrastructure for partnerships between the two sectors.

The report also examined the challenges in making these new partnerships work. Differences in the institutional norms of the sectors, their roles and responsibilities, and in operations may constrain their ability to work together. Because of these differences, partnerships between government and philanthropy require more time and resources to function than they would if they were working alone or within the same sector. Finding ways to sustain the partnerships over time amid changing political and financial environments also pose challenges, according to the report.

“Government and philanthropy are starting to see partnerships as critical to increase their impact but seldom do they understand how the other operates or what an effective philanthropic-government partnership might look like,” Ferris said. “The emergence of these offices, which are designed to support and manage strategic partnerships across sectors, offers valuable lessons for what makes partnerships more effective.”

Ferris recently contributed to an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times that positioned the value of philanthropic-government partnerships for the next Los Angeles mayor.

“Collaborations, particularly those that span across sectors, are not easy, but the center’s research has found that offices of strategic partnerships offer the potential to catalyze and accelerate meaningful efforts to make positive change,” Ferris wrote.

How might the physical space integrate the mind’s two perspectives: the logical, analytical, objective left brain and the intuitive, holistic, emotional right brain?

Enter the 20,000-square-foot, three-story Dornsife Neuroscience Pavilion, which opened November 2012. It encompasses the Dornsife Neuroimaging Center and the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI), housed at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, with its Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall.

Walk in and your eyes follow the stark white diagonal walls way up to the atrium windows shining down bright sunlight. Immediately, there’s a feeling of something significant happening inside.

To the left — or south — you’ll find a world-class auditorium designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician also responsible for the concert hall portion at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the New World Center, among other top performance spaces around the globe. This is where musical performances, theater, poetry readings and lectures take place.

Directly across to the right — or north — are the modern ways of investigating the human brain in operation: a 3-tesla magnetic resonance scanner and a laboratory of electroencephalography.

University Professor Antonio Damasio, director of the BCI (Photo/John Livzey)

“So you have these two giant creatures opposite each other — the brain scanning devices on one side,” said University Professor and BCI Director Antonio Damasio. “Then on the other, you have the traditional way of investigating human mind and behavior that goes all the way back to the Greeks: an amphitheater where you can hear a human being reciting poetry or playing music or reflecting on the state of humankind in a lecture.

“All of these endeavors are possible under one roof.”

Nirvana of neuroscience

In recent years, neuroscience at all levels has developed enormously.

In particular, the level of the mind concerned with higher behavior, the higher mind, has been significantly strengthened, Damasio said.

“As a result, we have become, for the first time, able to join the world of investigating human behavior and human mind, which has been traditionally carried out through the arts and humanities.”

Arts and sciences speak to one another, he said.

“We built it this way to make people go back and forth across these worlds,” said Damasio, holder of the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and professor of psychology and neurology, “and to allow students and young investigators to see quite clearly how these worlds naturally interconnect with each other. How the world of, say, theater or music is not separate from the world of science. And vice versa.”

Damasio and his wife, University Professor Hanna Damasio, BCI co-director, said calling the building the Brain and Creativity Institute brings to the fore the fact that the brain research conducted under its roof is fused with the realm of arts and creation.

The Damasios founded the BCI in 2006. The lead gift for the expanded building came from longtime university supporters Dana Dornsife and USC Trustee David Dornsife. Both sit on the BCI Board of Directors, which David Dornsife chairs. The Los Angeles-based architectural firm Perkins+Will fashioned the new BCI out of space between existing structures.

“Creativity is a very distinctive human ability,” said Antonio Damasio. “Human beings are creative and that’s one feature that makes them special. The idea was to have a building that would manifest very clearly these two strands of inquiry. The one that has to do with science and the traditional one that has to do with philosophy or the arts.”

Musical brain

One new study taking place at the BCI is connected to the arts. It seeks to understand what happens to the brains of young children learning music using the El Sistema method sometimes referred to as “passion first, refinement second.” Developed in Venezuela, the method teaches children with few resources to overcome adversity by first strengthening their spirit through music.

University Professor Hanna Damasio (Photo/John Livzey)

Led by Antonio and Hanna Damasio, holder of the Dana Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and professor of psychology and neurology, and neuroscientist Assal Habibi, herself a classical pianist, researchers are following children for five consecutive years from the start of their musical education, using standard psychological assessments and advanced brain imaging to track their brain, emotional and social developments. An expert on musical education from the USC Thornton School of Music, Beatriz Ilari completes the research team, which includes several graduate students of music and neuroscience.

The team is collaborating with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) on the project that will offer new insights and data about the role of early music engagement in learning and brain function. Study advisers include American cellist and virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma, a member of the BCI board; renowned conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim; and USC Thornton’s Midori Goto, a USC Distinguished Professor and the Jascha Heifetz Professor of Strings.

“We should not be studying music without musicians,” Antonio Damasio said, “and we treasure the advice we get from these giants of music.”

Clairvoyant computers?

On the pavilion’s first floor, Jonas Kaplan, research assistant professor of psychology, is among the BCI researchers who use the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to study the human mind.

In the past, scientists at the BCI have programmed computers to predict what a person is seeing, hearing or simply touching. They discovered that as you look at an object, your brain not only processes what the object looks like, but it remembers what it feels like to touch. A computer examining activity from the part of the brain processing touch could predict the object participants were looking at and holding — a fluffy sponge, a ball of yarn, a light bulb.

“We’re now actually moving beyond just looking at stimuli, hearing and touching things, into the realm of imagination,” Kaplan said.

In the experiments, participants inside the scanner watch silent videos, of say, a rooster crowing.

“They don’t hear anything,” he said. “But when they see the video, they have an imaginative experience. They hear the sound of crowing in their mind’s ear going along with the video.”

Or they watch someone playing the piano or a glass shattering or coins falling onto the floor — all with no sound. By analyzing the patterns that are evoked in the auditory parts of the brain, the computer can determine what sound the person was imagining in that circumstance and which video they were watching.

This brings scientists closer to knowing where sight, sound and touch come together or are synthesized in the brain.

“Some parts of the brain appear to integrate sound and touch,” Kaplan said. “And there are other parts that integrate touch and vision. And there may be parts that integrate all three. We want to map out these systems.”

They are also looking at where the sources of imagination are in the brain.

“Using the patterns of activity in those parts of the brain, we were able to determine what people were imagining, which then gives us evidence that this part of the brain is involved in imagining — the contents of imagination.”

The Zen-like feeling of the new pavilion follows the researchers as they walk upstairs. They pass walls where the works of contemporary artists are displayed and dispersed between offices in spaces for interaction or quiet reflection. Most of the offices have open ceilings and glass walls. The openness creates a sense of community and promotes collaboration.

Always, what strikes you most is the brightness from the windows of the atrium, positioned in the center so that the light emanates outward like a star.

“The building is fundamentally designed to support our intellectual endeavors,” said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education, psychology and neuroscience. “So as you walk into the building, unlike most traditional office spaces, you experience a confluence of arts and science.”

Immordino-Yang is perfecting her research on human experience to an art form. In one recent cross-cultural study, she shed light on how individuals feel and show emotions.

Still waters

In extensive studies, Immordino-Yang presented participants with stories about compassion and inspiration-inducing, real-world events, such as the story of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head and neck while returning home on a school bus. The Taliban wanted to punish Yousafzai for being a girl seeking an education. As Immordino-Yang’s team told Yousafzai’s story to each participant, the researchers studied the participants’ natural behavior — for instance, were they waving their hands or being unexpressive while discussing Yousafzai’s miraculous recovery and heroic activism?

Immordino-Yang compared those interviews with the neurobiological correlates in the same participants. At the BCI’s fMRI scanner, she recorded their neural activity while they reviewed the same stories. As the participants reacted to the stories while inside the scanner, they indicated their range of feeling, from weak to being emotionally overwhelmed.

She found that the brain activity underlying emotional feelings differed depending on how expressive a person was in the interview, though everyone in the experiment, expressive or not, reported feeling strong emotions.

“The people who were weeping and grabbing tissues and openly expressive did not report that they felt more strongly than the people who were sitting there calmly deliberating on what the story meant to them and how they felt about it,” Immordino-Yang said.

In one study, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has found that people learn from their culture how to express their emotions. (Photo/Steve Cohn)

“There were also no differences in the magnitude of the signal in the anterior insula — a brain region that’s important for the experience of emotional states or for feeling. There were no differences in the magnitude of the BOLD [blood oxygen level-dependent] signal there.”

However, more expressive people showed a tighter correlation between brain activity in the anterior insula and the strength of the feeling they reported. In other words, individuals’ behavior predicted the way in which their anterior insula supported feelings even though more expressive people did not report feeling more strongly and did not show bigger neural responses.

When participants said they felt strongly and were also emotional, those two events were moving together to create a more tightly correlated pattern.

Conversely, those who expressed their emotion more calmly but said they felt strongly showed a looser correlation between how they felt and their brain activity in the anterior insula.

“What we think is going on is that people learn from their culture how to experience their own emotions; they learn how to conceptualize their feelings,” Immordino-Yang said. “Expressiveness seems to be shaped by your own culture and by your own biology, acting additively.”

Shaping your behavior over time may indirectly teach you how much attention you should pay to your body’s reaction to know how you feel, she said, and future experiments are set to test this interpretation.

“So if you’re a person like me who’s super Italian-like and waving my arms around and crying and doing all these things — when I want to know, how do I feel about that young woman who fought the Taliban? — I may be more likely to pay attention to my own bodily response,” Immordino-Yang said. “I might think to myself, ‘Well, my heart’s pounding, my throat is dry, so I must be really upset about this.’

“Whereas I think if you’re a person who’s been taught over time not to show a big bodily response then you would be attending to something else in order to decide. When you’re expressive, there are more prominent cues from your body to tell you, ‘Wow, I really am feeling emotional.’ But when you’re less expressive, the cues may be subtler,” she continued.

“So your culture appears to shift the way in which your emotions result in body reactions, which in turn may shape how emotions are experienced. Cultural shaping of behavior may actually change the experience of emotions — not the strength of feelings but potentially the process by which individuals become aware of and evaluate their feelings.”

Spiritual science

John Monterosso, associate professor of psychology at the BCI, is an expert on decision-making, impulsivity and self-control. He’s interested in this key step in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other 12-step programs: recognizing a higher power that can give strength.

“If you ask people who overcome addictions in the 12-step approach, if you ask them what they think happened, many feel very sure that personally for them, spirituality was critical,” Monterosso said.

“It’s sometimes explicitly religious, but it isn’t always. It is sometimes a very vague sense of spirituality.”

For example, recovering addicts in AA believe in a connection to something larger or nature or the circle of life, he said. Social scientists can’t assume they are right. The addicts who say a belief in a higher power helped them recover may be flat wrong.

“But it seems a greater possibility given the amount of time and attention from people who spend their lives thinking about this, that these psychological experiences are important for overcoming the addiction,” he said.

“As you become addicted, you lose connection with other things in your world. Everything begins to fall away, relationships suffer. Eventually work suffers. Life becomes more concrete and specific around the substance.”

People in the 12-step community often say that even before their breakdown of connections to larger things, some kind of lacking in their life was the starting point. A feeling of disconnection was often key to their problem.

The recovery process is often considered related to reconnecting, or for the first time connecting, to some kind of spiritual perspective.

“OK, so I’m a psychologist,” Monterosso said. “We want to think about that in psychological terms. What is their experience psychologically? There’s a ton of research, mainly questionnaires, about people’s spirituality. But there’s little so far that can give us a handle on what these spiritual experiences are about emotionally and physiologically.”

Through interviews coupled with tests on the participants’ brains in the BCI’s fMRI scanner, Monterosso hopes to discover how these spiritual experiences shift people’s behaviors.

“How do they go from a place where they’re responding to only immediate gratification to seeing things more globally, or responding to bigger themes, to bigger considerations?”

Still in the planning stages, the study involves Homeless Health Care Los Angeles’ needle exchange program.

Located in the downtown Skid Row area, the program is meant to decrease the number of drug users sharing contaminated syringes. Monterosso is planning with the LA organization to test participants who can help shed light on how their behavior and physiology changes when hearing compelling stories that may bring out a feeling of spirituality.

“We’re hoping to get some idea about how complex emotions related to spirituality are relevant in self-control and recovery from addiction.”

Do me a kindness

For the past three decades, researchers studying gratitude believed the emotion was a result of two catalysts: 1) a gift was given at great effort by the giver and 2) the gift fulfilled a serious need for the recipient.

Not so, said Glenn Fox, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the BCI. While gifts that come at great effort and fulfill a serious need are indeed capable of eliciting high levels of gratitude, one or the other is enough, Fox found.

“High effort or high need alone is sufficient for high gratitude.”

In his research, Fox is relying on the USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education and its archive of videotaped testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust.

Fox and his team spent hundreds of hours watching and listening to many of the archive’s more than 52,000 testimonials. They collected scenarios in which a survivor receives some sort of gift. A gift of peanuts to a starving survivor allergic to peanuts might elicit mixed feelings. Other gifts — for example, when a prisoner whispers “stay left” to someone exiting a train at Auschwitz, saving his life when all those on the right are sent to a gas chamber — would certainly bring out deep gratitude.

In Fox’s study, participants were asked to take the perspective of the survivor and read about his or her personal experiences while connected to a brain scanner. Participants also filled out questionnaires describing their emotions.

“Our preliminary data shows that gifts eliciting near unspeakable gratitude — for example, being given shelter and food when there is a great personal risk to the giver for doing so — activate brain regions associated with happiness, social bonding and joy,” Fox said.

In the preliminary findings, Fox has discovered that a gift drawing the greatest amount of gratitude is one that helps restore the recipient’s dignity. Using real scenarios from the USC Shoah Foundation, the opportunity to speak one’s own language meant a great deal to survivors taken out of their country.

“If they were taken from France to a concentration camp in Austria, for instance, being able to speak French was really a welcome experience,” Fox said, “even though it didn’t necessarily feed them. Just being able to speak in one’s own language was dignity-restoring and the recipients were grateful for it.”

Fox’s studies indicated that gratitude lives at the center of good human conduct and serves as a fulcrum by which people seek to do right by others. When one is the beneficiary of good human conduct, one experiences a concert of positive emotions ranging from relief to elation, Fox said. These emotions can in turn motivate people to expend great sums of energy to reward those near the source of the good conduct, creating, literally, a virtuous cycle.

“There is something very real about the phrase, ‘pay it forward,’ ” Fox said. “Gratitude is a powerful emotion.”

No smell wonder

Neuroscience PhD student Kingson Man was inspired by Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999) when he read the book as a high school student in New York City. He chose USC Dornsife specifically to work with the Damasios at the BCI.

Man is interested in how the human senses of sound, sight, touch, smell and taste are merged together. The societal impact of his research could benefit people with brain damage, including semantic dementia, which inhibits one’s ability to distinguish the difference among objects.

“They can’t tell the difference between apples or oranges or, say, different tools,” Man said. “They don’t know how to use a wrench versus a screwdriver anymore. They’ve lost that conception and knowledge.”

Man is investigating how conceptual knowledge is organized and how people might be rehabilitated when they’ve lost that capacity.

“I think a promising strategy is to use yet another sense to try to learn new associations,” he said. “So if you’re trying to tell the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver by looking and touching, what could you do? You could try to recruit a third sense. So these are very manual objects.

“Maybe, to be far-fetched, you could paint a different scent onto each tool,” he continued. “Then you learn that the association of strawberries means wrenches, which are for doing a certain thing. If you just smell it, then you can activate it and you can reach that knowledge through a different route.”

Not far-fetched at the BCI. Researchers under its roof know something is happening here. These scientists are beyond teetering at the cusp.

“Intellect and emotions are not separate,” Immordino-Yang said. “They’re completely feeding off one another and integrated to each other. It’s the ideas themselves that are inspirational to me — and the dynamic culture created here of intellectual exchange and debate.”

The researchers are all, individually and collectively, following the light.

A list of what not to bring or do near the apparatus warns against pacemakers, metal implants, metal fire extinguishers, watches, keys, cellphones and, of course, smoking.

“Be careful to remove your glasses, hairpins or anything metal at all,” Sarah Gimbel, a postdoctoral research associate at BCI, cautioned a young woman who had agreed to be scanned for a research project.

Weighing several tons, the magnet in this scanner has a strength of 3 tesla. It is the most powerful scanner available for clinical use today. Compare 3 tesla with magnets having half the strength that can lift a tractor. The 3-tesla magnet is 60,000 times more powerful than Earth’s magnetic field.

Near the machine, metal items become dangerous projectiles that will abruptly and with great force be pulled out of your pocket or hair, or fly off your wrist. Artificial heart valves are forbidden. You have a bullet fragment in your body from an old war wound? You can’t be scanned.

“Anything in your pockets?” Gimbel asked Laura Driscoll, an international relations senior who took the test for the experience and the $20-an-hour pay. “Hair clips, coins, anything?”

“I have a belt,” Driscoll said.

“Let’s go ahead and take that off,” Gimbel said. “OK, perfect. Leave your shoes at the door and we’ll get you all set up.”

Metal free, Driscoll slipped off her sneakers, entered the scanning room and sat on the scanner bed, where the BCI’s Jonas Kaplan, research assistant professor of psychology, and Christine Tipper, a postdoctoral research associate, began connecting electrodes and a belt to her chest to monitor her heart and breathing rates. They attached electrodes to her foot to measure skin conductance.

When scanning, the machine sounds like the motor of a water pick gone awry — only many times louder. Driscoll was given earplugs and headphones, which muffled the deafening noise of the fMRI but still allowed her to hear instructions from researchers.

Driscoll reclined on a long table extending from the machine, and Tipper placed a USC comforter over her.

“She’s going to be in there for a little over an hour, and she can’t move the whole time,” Gimbel said. “So we try to make them as comfortable as possible.”

A loud whir began and Driscoll disappeared into the doughnut hole of what looked like a stark white spacecraft that is 4-feet deep and 8 feet in diameter.

Driscoll was participating in a study called “Neurobiology of Narrative Framing.” The study brought together University Professor Antonio Damasio, BCI director; University Professor Hanna Damasio, BCI co-director; Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education, psychology and neuroscience; Kaplan; Gimbel; Tipper; BCI researcher Andrew Gordon; and others from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

The researchers are studying people’s neuropsychological reactions to personal narratives. They’re investigating how people are influenced by the way in which events are framed by a narrator and appeal to the listener’s own values, knowledge and experiences.

While Driscoll’s brain activity was scanned and monitored, she read a set of stories in which people talk about a personal moral dilemma or transgression.

For example, there might have been a writers’ strike at a major newspaper. The person in the story, a writer, broke an unofficial societal code to never cross a picket line. The writer did so because she thought of the bigger picture: The First Amendment guarantee of free speech must be upheld.

After reading the narratives, Driscoll was asked whether she thought the person in the story would have acted differently for any amount of money. This showed researchers how deeply felt the beliefs of the narrator came across to Driscoll.

Later, Driscoll answered a questionnaire that revealed her own beliefs about the issues discussed in the stories. The researchers compared her brain activity while each issue was discussed with her written responses to see how they matched up.

“We’re getting a handle on how the brain is processing these narratives and relating how participants respond to the stories with their own values,” Tipper said. “With all of these stories, every person who gets scanned responds differently. For some people, crossing the picket line is absolutely reprehensible. And others would say freedom of speech is more important.”

She added: “So there are these polarizing issues that they’re watching. We’re really utilizing the differences between individuals to get at what it is that makes these sacred values tick in people’s brains.”

In part, quantitative analyses of cross-cultural sacred narrative framing can be used to predict effective framing. The researchers would determine how narratives can be most effective given particulars of the situation, the narrator’s goals and the culture of the listeners. The analysis can be validated through behavioral and neurobiological measurements.

“How are you doing in there, Laura?” Gimbel asked Driscoll.

“OK,” Driscoll replied.

“Excellent,” Gimbel said. “This is going to be the very last round of stories.”

While Driscoll read the last group of stories, Gimbel added, “We always check on them from time to time. People are known to fall asleep in there. It gets pretty cozy.”

For the first time, a global team of researchers led by USC Professor Cheng-Ming Chuong has uncovered unique cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in American alligators. Their study appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Humans naturally only have two sets of teeth — baby teeth and adult teeth,” Chuong said. “Ultimately, we want to identify stem cells that can be used as a resource to stimulate tooth renewal in adult humans who have lost teeth. But to do that, we must first understand how they renew in other animals and why they stop in people.”

Whereas most vertebrates can replace teeth throughout their lives, human teeth are naturally replaced only once, despite the lingering presence of a band of epithelial tissue called the dental lamina, which is crucial to tooth development. Because alligators have well-organized teeth with similar form and structure as mammalian teeth and are capable of lifelong tooth renewal, the authors reasoned that they might serve as models for mammalian tooth replacement.

“Alligator teeth are implanted in sockets of the dental bone, like human teeth,” said Ping Wu, assistant professor of pathology at the Keck School and first author of the study. “They have 80 teeth, each of which can be replaced up to 50 times over their lifetime, making them the ideal model for comparison to human teeth.”

Using microscopic imaging techniques, the researchers found that each alligator tooth is a complex unit of three components — a functional tooth, a replacement tooth and the dental lamina — in different developmental stages. The tooth units are structured to enable a smooth transition from dislodgement of the functional, mature tooth to replacement with the new tooth. Identifying three developmental phases for each tooth unit, the researchers concluded that the alligator dental laminae contain what appear to be stem cells from which new replacement teeth develop.

“Stem cells divide more slowly than other cells,” said co-author Randall Widelitz, associate professor of pathology at the Keck School. “The cells in the alligator’s dental lamina behaved like we would expect stem cells to behave. In the future, we hope to isolate those cells from the dental lamina to see whether we can use them to regenerate teeth in the lab.”

The researchers also intend to learn what molecular networks are involved in repetitive renewal and hope to apply the principles to regenerative medicine in the future.

The authors also reported novel cellular mechanisms by which the tooth unit develops in the embryo and molecular signaling that speeds growth of replacement teeth when functional teeth are lost prematurely.

Co-authors included colleagues from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, University of Georgia, National Cheng Kung University, National Taiwan University and Xiangya Hospital in China.

The research was supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (grant numbers 5R01AR042177-19, 5R01AR060306-03 and 2R01AR047364-11A1).

And to prove the point, the message was delivered by some of the top female professionals in those fields during a symposium at The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Among the presenters were several representatives from the Keck School of Medicine of USC who perform research at the institute.

“Women in STEM: Designing, Discovering and Delivering Change,” held on April 24, was in part a response to first lady Michelle Obama’s call last year to encourage more girls and women to study STEM subjects.

The statistics show why it is so important — while women make up 48 percent of the workforce, they hold only 24 percent of STEM jobs. And there is a growing need for skilled workers in STEM fields.

Speakers at the symposium included Michele Kipke, professor of pediatrics and preventive medicine at the Keck School; Roberta Diaz Brinton, USC School of Pharmacy professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences, biomedical engineering and neurology; Heather Volk, associate professor of research in the Division of Environmental Health in the Department of Preventive Medicine and the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute; and Maja Matarić, professor of computer science and vice dean for research at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

A panel discussion at the symposium was led by philanthropist Cheryl Saban. She and her husband, Haim, gave a transformational gift a decade ago that resulted in The Saban Research Institute being named in their honor.

Diaz Brinton shared with the audience a personal story about her own challenging childhood environment.

“I took on problems bigger than I was,” she said. “What I learned served me well as a scientist. I can’t give up. That’s not an option.”

Volk advised the audience to develop relationships with others — to become part of a team.

“That support, those groups really mean a lot to me in my research,” she said. “I couldn’t do it by myself.”

She said that she found support when she was working on someone else’s team. And now that she’s forming her own research team, she finds the same solace.

“The great part of this collaboration is the people I’m working with are my peers,” she said. “And I think for women in STEM fields, myself especially, working with girls has been really incredible for me.”

Matarić told the group that it was OK to make mistakes along the way.

“Nobody is perfect,” she said. “Women are just more open and worry more about it than men. Since you’re not perfect, embrace the imperfections you can live with.”

She told the group that it’s normal to feel insecure, but to push ahead anyway.

Matarić left the audience with a question to ask oneself in challenging situations: “What would you do if you weren’t scared?”