Achievement

IGERT funding has been instrumental in enabling Dr. Larry Snyder’s monkey imaging work. Imaging brain activity in humans is a standard procedure in labs across the country. In non-human primates, we can do more invasive recording of brain activity. With the help of the IGERT, we have begun imaging monkeys in order to form a bridge between human imaging results and non-human invasive brain monitoring results. For example, the IGERT capitalization money has funded a programmer who adapted our code for use with monkey imaging, and paid for a dual-use (human and monkey) eye movement monitoring system for use in imaging experiments. A difficulty in interpreting imaging data is that fMRI is only an indirect measure of brain activity; it actually measures tissue oxygen. To address this, an IGERT trainee in Dr. Snyder’s lab is developing a method of invasively measuring oxygen levels along with brain activity in a non-human primate, to better understand exactly what imaging results mean.