Blame it on the mulberry, birch, and oak trees if you’re in Manhattan, said Guy Robinson, Ph.D., where Fordham University maintains the only official pollen monitoring station in the city. Those three species dominated Robinson’s latest sample slides heading into what’s traditionally the peak pollen weeks of the season—the first two weeks of May.

Robinson maintains and collects pollen samples from the station, located at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on 60th Street east of Columbus Avenue, as well as another station at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center in Armonk, New York. Throughout the spring and summer, he feeds the data to the National Allergy Bureau of the American Academy for Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and posts a spreadsheet on @FordhamPollen on X as a public service.

Robinson has been at it for 25 years, while teaching biology and paleoecology in the Department of Natural Sciences, first as a senior lecturer at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, now as a visiting scholar. Once a week, on Tuesdays, he hops up on a wall outside the McMahon residence hall on 60th Street and unwraps a clear inch-wide strip of tape from a cylinder in the Burkard spore trap. The cylinder makes one complete turn in a week. The top of the machine spins like a weather vane, capturing the microscopic particles that cause the seasonal suffering of so many.

After coiling the tape into a metal canister, he carries it to a biology lab in Lowenstein. There Robinson snips the tape into segments—one for every 24-hour period. Then he begins the tedious process of counting pollen particles. 

On April 30, peering through a microscope while working a rudimentary clicker counter with his left hand and making notes with his right, Robinson said that by now, he recognizes most of the different tree pollens “just at a glance.” That’s how he gets the number we all know as the “pollen count”—the number of pollen particles per cubic meter of air. 

He added, “Humans are still better at counting pollen than any machine.” 

No More Sycamores

Robinson has a paper in review now for the Urban Design and Planning Journal suggesting that municipalities should take into consideration the effects of allergens when creating their tree-planting plans.

“They do not need to be planting sycamores in the city,” he said, noting that the species is highly allergenic. Fortunately, the sycamore pollen numbers are already subsiding for this season.

Trees like cherry, hawthorne, and pear, with noticeable flowers, he said, are not major contributors to allergies because they are insect pollinated (the pollen is not carried by the wind).

Those wreaking the most allergy havoc are oak, birch, alder, walnut, sycamore, and elm. Pine pollen is not a major allergen, although pines produce a lot of pollen, he said.

Every year is slightly different in terms of timing and quantity of pollen, said Robinson. But tree pollen nearly always peaks in the same order each year, with sycamore pollen appearing first. 

So what can you do if you are allergic to pollen?

“What we learned during COVID is that what does seem to have helped is wearing a mask,” Robinson said.  “Even the cheapest ones filter out most of the pollen.”

Working with one of her Fordham professors at the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience, Rabia Gondur devised an innovative way to understand how an insect’s brain functions during natural movements.

When you do something simple like pick up your phone or wash your hands, what’s happening in your brain? Quite a lot, actually—neurons are firing everywhere because of all your minor movements, not to mention background activities like respiration.

“Your brain is not just stopping to do this one activity,” said Rabia Gondur, FCLC ’22, a computational research scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. “It’s very noisy in the brain.”

Cutting through this noise to see which movements fire which neurons is the subject of her research, which she’ll soon present at a prestigious international conference on machine learning.

Gondur devised an innovative approach with help from one of her professors, Stephen Keeley, Ph.D.—a collaboration that began easily during her senior year when his presentation in one of her capstone courses spoke to her interest in research. “I just reached out to him, and he was super accommodating,” she said.

They worked on the research while Gondur—an integrative neuroscience major—completed the requirements for the accelerated master’s degree program in data science at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, after which she landed her job at Cold Spring, where she is part of a computational neuroscience research group.

She will present her research at one of the world’s leading forums for machine learning, the annual International Conference on Learning Representations, taking place in Vienna, Austria, in May.

Using Machine Learning to Study Day-to-Day Brain Function

Gondur’s research is one of many studies seeking to understand a brain’s response during complex, natural behaviors, building on prior studies of more basic movements—for instance, what happens in a monkey’s brain when it reaches left versus right in response to a prompt.

The eventual goal is to get beyond laboratory studies to see, in detail, how the human brain naturally functions. “That’s ultimately what neuroscientists are interested in understanding, is how the brain works in our day-to-day lives,” said Keeley, an assistant professor of natural science who runs a machine learning lab on the Lincoln Center campus.

But to work toward this goal, scientists have to start small—literally. For their study, Keeley and Gondur examined the brains of insects: a fly grooming itself and a moth flitting around to follow a moving image of a flower. For this, they relied on data that their collaborators at other universities gathered using brain imaging technology.

Keeley and Gondur devised a machine learning algorithm to find links between the bugs’ brain signals and the subtleties of their movements, as captured in video stills. It differs from similar algorithms because they added processes to make the measurements more precise and the results easier to interpret.

A New Tool for Brain Research

Such techniques could one day illuminate everything from brain-based diseases to variances in people’s motor skills, Keeley said. For now, their model gives a new tool to scientists trying to tease out relationships hidden in complex data. “If you are interested in genomics, if you’re interested in medicine, if you’re interested in just anything, you can basically tweak the model,” Gondur said.

Keeley is always working with undergraduates on research projects tailored to their skill level. “Rabia came in with quite a good amount of talent, and so I was able to give her a very challenging project, and she was very successful,” he said.

“I thought it was very cool and current and wanted to be part of it,” said Skillin, a sophomore environmental studies student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

He and Dickantone are among eight Fordham students hoping to find answers to several questions about the bugs that no one seems to know yet: How often do they mate? Are squirrels making meals out of them? Why are they attracted to certain types of city buildings and not others?

These answers could help point to ways to control the invasive species, their professor said.

Ellen van Wilgenburg, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in the Department of Natural Sciences at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is spearheading the research and teaching the students scientific methods to collect data that can be used in larger studies of the lanternflies. So far, existing research has focused more on the agricultural impact than the behavior of the species. 

“It’s pest management and applied research, which is very important work,” she said. “But I think behavioral ecology is also important and can help with pest management, too.”

Dickantone, a senior neuroscience major, and Skillin have now begun dissecting the insects under the microscope to see how many spermatophores, or sperm packets, the female insects have in their abdomens to determine how many times they have mated. They also have recorded videos of the courtship process showing the males vibrating their wings rapidly and stroking the females in an effort to attract them. 

Each female lays 30 to 50 eggs in masses on trees. They are currently at that egg-laying phase of their life cycle; they will die off in November and December. 

“You would expect species that are introduced and encounter a novel environment would mate [more than once],“ to help the species survive, van Wilgenburg said, and the students are trying to determine if that is the case with the lanternflies.

Little Calorie Bombs

Another team of students has been collecting squirrel feces and looking for molecular markers that would indicate a developing taste for lanternflies. They have witnessed squirrels eating the insects in the park. This is significant because the species has few known predators, most likely helping its rapid population explosion.

“Actually they are not very tasty,” van Wilgenburg said. “Supposedly they are very bitter.” She said the trees the lanternflies prefer contain quassinoids, compounds that make them unpalatable to most insect-eating animals. “Squirrels eat acorns, which are also bitter, so maybe.”

Van Wilgenburg added, “Females, especially when full of eggs, must be little calorie bombs and full of nutrition.”

How High?

Another group of students in her Global Ecology Lab looked at what features on buildings attract lanternflies. There have not been any published studies looking into this, but several researchers have speculated that the lanternflies confuse tall buildings for trees. Van Wilgenburg said her students’ data showed height doesn’t matter. What they found does matter is if a building has a lot of glass on its lower floors.

She said she wants to look at it further, perhaps next year, and collect more data. “Could it be UV light wavelengths? Maybe we could find something that could work as traps.”

Spotted lanternflies are native to China, where they are kept in check by a parasitic wasp. In the U.S., they were first detected in Pennsylvania in September 2014 while they were mostly feasting on another invasive species, the Tree of Heaven. They have caused a great deal of alarm among state agriculture departments. 

But since then, as they have multiplied and migrated and developed a taste for other plants, scientists are realizing the bugs don’t do a terrible amount of harm other than being an annoyance, van Wilgenburg said, noting that fruit trees and vineyards are the only agricultural species of concern.

To Stomp or Not to Stomp?

So what about the trending effort to try stomping them out?

Thirty-five percent of them at relevant life stages—mainly egg masses—would need to be killed to start lowering the population growth, van Wilgenburg said, citing a study from 2021. 

“Stomping on them is not going to help.”

“I’m a city girl at heart, and I really love the Lincoln Center area. You have Central Park, a variety of restaurants and theaters, and a lot of diversity here,” she said.

Med-School Bound

She also knew that she wanted to go into medicine. She had lost her father, Mohammad, during her senior year in high school to complications from a stroke, and the experience inspired her to pursue a career where she could help prevent similar tragedies.

At Fordham, she joined the pre-health track and chose natural sciences as her major, where she took classes such as animal physiology, neurochemistry, and neuropharmacology. She is applying for medical school in the spring, and looking for research assistant positions in the meantime.

The kindness of medical staff that she encountered while her father was undergoing treatment is part of what inspires her.

“I want to be that kind of positive light for families that are going through it,” she said.

Fellowships in Science and Humanities

Last summer, she participated in a University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry Undergraduate Research Fellowship, where she conducted research on mortality rates for patients undergoing pancreatic cancer surgery.

Though she majored in the sciences, Asha also enjoyed her humanities classes at Fordham. As part of a Teagle fellowship in 2021, Asha did a project tying the themes in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk to contemporary issues of racial injustice that were exacerbated during the COVID pandemic.

Her favorite course at Fordham was Faith and Critical Reasoning, which she took with Leo Guardado, Ph.D. It helped her see how theology can apply to scientific concepts such as artificial intelligence, she said.

“I also come from a Muslim background, so even though Fordham is a Catholic institution, I appreciate the fact that he took the time to go through the sacred text of each religion, and just made it all really easy to understand,” she said.

Prioritizing Mental Health

Just as important was the help she got when the road to graduation got a little bumpy. Her return to in-person classes after the pandemic was accompanied by notoriously hard classes such as organic chemistry, genetics, and anatomy.

Last year, Asha found herself battling anxiety and insomnia. She decided to prioritize her mental and physical health by going to University Health Services, working with a psychiatrist, and asking for accommodations for testing and assignments from Fordham. She still made the Dean’s list three years in a row.

“Looking back, I’m very grateful because things are just gonna get harder going forward. There are always going to be things that pile up. It was just really a learning experience, and because of last year, I’m in a much better mindset this year,” she said.

Hope to Spare

Deborah Luckett, Ph.D., a senior lecturer of biology, had Asha in her Concepts in Biology course as a first-year student and again this year in Science, Technology, and Society’s Values. She has no doubt that Asha will thrive.

“She’s going be my doctor whether she realizes it or not,” she said laughing.

In addition to drive and good grades, Luckett said Asha possesses a keen ability to pay attention to others.

“If you don’t really know Afsana and you’re talking to her, you may think she’s not listening, but she can say word for word just about anything you just said,” she said.

“She’s very dedicated, she loves what she does, and she loves being around people. If she’s caring for a person who is very ill, they will never feel neglected and will never feel like there is no hope. Because she will have hope for both of them.”

“I went into a lab telling Doctor Rodenas that I have shaky hands and thinking that that was just going to be curtains for me and I wasn’t going to be able to do it,” said Murphy-Wilson.

She credited Rodenas-Ruano with giving her just the right balance of guidance and autonomy in the lab for her to gain confidence.

“Not everyone is going to hold your hand along the way, so when you’re put in an environment where you have to work by yourself, you practice a lot—and yes, sit there and get frustrated—but you have to work through it and figure out how best to maneuver,” she said. “But I think being able to accomplish these experiments has definitely allowed me to consider surgical options for my career that I wouldn’t have thought about before.”

Rodenas-Ruano said as difficult as dissection can be, it’s not as hard as the actual science.

“[The students] are building their fine motor skills and they are amazing at it, but that’s the easy part,” said Rodenas-Ruano. “The hard part is being able to do biochemical and molecular experiments in an accurate and reproducible way, to measure levels of gene expression and what that gene associates with that could regulate it.”

Rodenas-Ruano tasked Murphy-Wilson and her partner in the lab, junior Jessica Caushi, with creating an epigenetic map of the KCC2 Chloride transporter in neurons in developing zebrafish. In other words, they are using developmental neuroscience with the zebrafish to look into the mechanisms behind the nervous system.

In the nervous system, there are excitatory and inhibitory neurons, explained Caushi. Excitatory neurons allow information to flow, in the form of electrical activity, through the brain. Inhibitory neurons regulate or quench that electrical signal when appropriate. Initially, all the neurons are excitatory, but at a critical point in development, a population of those excitatory neurons become inhibitory. And that is important, because balance between the excitatory and inhibitory neurons is necessary for normal brain function, said Caushi.

“An imbalance could be related to diseases such as autism and epilepsy,” she said. “It’s important that we study this.”

Examining Fast-Developing Embryos

The KCC2 gene triggers the inhibitory neurons. The gene is known as a chloride exporter because it maintains the chloride concentrations inside and outside the cell that are ultimately responsible for neuronal inhibition. Ultimately, the student researchers are trying to find out what “turns on” this powerful gene. Last summer, Murphy-Wilson found that the KCC2 gene was turned on at 18 hours after zebrafish is fertilized.

“The zebrafish have a really quick developmental period, so we’re able to get a lot of research done in a shorter amount of time than if we were working with mammals,” said Murphy-Wilson. “They also develop the eggs externally, so they’re not inside the mom, which allows us to manipulate them in ways that we wouldn’t be able to work inside mammals.”

Through a confocal microscope, students can follow embryonic development from one cell to two cells to four cells to eight cells and onwards, said Rodenas-Ruano. Within 16 hours students begin to see what looks like a fish. They switch to a stereomicroscope when they begin dissection and remove the chorion, the outermost embryo membrane of the embryos. Then it’s off with their heads to get to the brain where microdissection begins. They stain the brain to examine whether there is an expression of proteins important for excitation or inhibition.

Controlling the Process

In order to tell how many hours after fertilization that the KCC2 gene turns on, one must know exactly when fertilization takes place. To do that, the students attempt to control and observe the process.

In nature, zebrafish mate when the sun rises. But in the small room filled with fish tanks at the Lincoln Center lab, students control the light cycle. To set up a mating, they plan the dissections and experiments first and work back from there to select an ideal time for fertilization to take place. It takes about 30 minutes for the female fish to mate and drop her eggs. Then the clock starts ticking on that roughly 18-hour observation period. Students have to think fast so they can examine them at the right time to focus on what turns the KCC2 gene on.

Troubleshooting on the Fly

“It’s here that critical thinking comes in to play; it means you have this information, you have these skills, but in biology, things aren’t always the same,” said Rodenas-Ruano. “So they have to think on their feet and modify things, troubleshoot so that we can make this a good, reliable experiment that’s going to give us some reproducible, accurate data.”

Alma Rodenas-Ruano said that normally this type of research is the type of research done at med schools and Ph.D. programs, but the Natural Sciences Department has some very talented undergraduates.

“These experiments they’re doing are very, very difficult to do because they require a very specific precision and repetitiveness that also requires skill and knowledge, all of which they have,” she said.

At the start of the book, Adam’s life is at a standstill. He has little to show for his research of the cult of the dead in ancient Israel, until he discovers a tablet that sheds light on shadowy underworld figures known as the Healers in Canaanite myth and the Bible. While the Healers are mentioned frequently in the ancient texts, their theological role and origin have never really been fleshed out, said Morris.

On the day Adam finds the tablet, he loses his grandfather, the man who raised him. As Adam mourns, he labors to interpret the text. Are the Healers ancestors of the ancient Jews? Are they the original inhabitants of the land? Are they gods? Or all three? As Adam examines the tablet for answers, he unwittingly unearths family secrets that test his loyalties and entangle him in the police investigation of Danny, an old family friend.

Morris said his grief over the death of his grandfather—with whom he was very close—was an inspiration for the book. In Jewish tradition, Morris said, burying the dead is seen as the last act of kindness one can do for a loved one. He recalled his grandfather’s funeral:

“I remember taking the shovel and not wanting to give it up, that I felt like this was my last opportunity to have this deep, personal, physical connection, to be able to do something for my grandfather, and I was very reluctant to share that,” said Morris. “Of course, I did, because it’s a community of mourners who all need to be able to participate, but it was a wrenching thing to give the shovel away.”

The characters developed quite apart from Morris’ own story. However, that the character Adam can only permit himself to explore his grief through texts and study, is not too far from Morris’ analytic approach to life. Elsewhere, Adam’s best friend is a “disaffected gay Catholic biologist” and his love interest is a liturgical composer “struggling to hold on to her belief.” As for the Healers, Morris said he first learned of them in a college course.

“They merited only a short discussion in the class, but they loomed very large in my imagination and I read as many books as I could over the years that addressed the relationship between Judaism and Canaanite culture,” he said.

As a scientist, Morris didn’t take writing fiction lightly. He is very involved with several faculty groups around the University and counts several English professors among his friends. He said he looked at the novel, which he self-published, as something to be “built,” and the scientist in him wondered, “What makes this work?” His process was very practical.

“When I first started working on the book, I wouldn’t call it my novel, I called it ‘my folly,’ because it felt hubristic. What’s a geneticist doing writing a piece of fiction?” he said. “How could I presume to do something like that?”

As the novel developed he showed it to colleagues who were “incredibly supportive” and offered constructive feedback. Several Fordham professors are thanked in the acknowledgments. Karina Martin Hogan, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, helped Morris with his Hebrew grammar “because she knows this stuff inside and out,” he said. But the archeological research was his own.

“The philology, where Adam is actually trying to interpret the tablet, understanding what’s happening, and the Bible studies, these have been passions of mine for a very long time,” he said.

He said ultimately, the idea of a scientist writing fiction isn’t that big a deal at a place like Fordham.

“One of the things people say about a Jesuit university, particularly about Fordham, is that you can bring your whole self to work,” he said. “If you have passions outside of your particular field, that still informs who you are and you have the opportunity to bring those passions to your relationships with your colleagues or to your students or to your scholarship.”

“Depression is very misunderstood,” she said. “If we can figure out an exact chemical path to understand why this happens in the brain, then we can come up with better treatment plans and better medications.”

This past summer Reisner, a sophomore biology major in the Department of Natural Sciences at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, mapped neurons in the brain associated with motivated behavior. The research was conducted at Columbia University as part of a program sponsored by Fordham’s Office of Research that matches students with other New York-based institutions. Officially known as the Fordham-Columbia, Fordham-NYU and Fordham-IBM Research Fellow and Research Intern Program, the effort promotes research collaborations between the four institutions.

“We are using this kind of program to find connections between students and outside research opportunities to make sure we retain best and the brightest,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer for the University.

This year, the collaborative research program focuses on five specific areas of study: neuroscience, cybersecurity, social innovation, global studies, and urban studies. Hong said he met Reisner at an award ceremony and was very impressed with her enthusiasm for research.

“The students in the program are very enterprising and sometimes we need to find innovative ways to expand our resources to support them,” said Hong.

Reisner’s research was supervised by Eduardo Gallo, Ph.D., assistant professor of biological sciences at Rose Hill, and Christoph Kellendonk, Ph.D., an independent investigator in the Departments of Pharmacology and Psychiatry at Columbia. The project is in its intermediate stages and the scientists hope to have preliminary results this fall.

“A lot of times students are looking to do research and while we cover many different scientific disciplines at Fordham, they may not find a lab that matches their interest,” said Gallo. “They want to get their hands on their topics of interest. I’ve seen it. It reenergizes their passion for science when they do.”

Gallo said the program’s benefits have been two-fold: it provides support for the lab to undertake new research topics and it provides students with a funding opportunity to do research over the summer.

“This has allowed us to work with a lab where they do these types of projects routinely, students learn those techniques and bring them back to Fordham,” said Gallo. “This helps foster collaboration, and the scientists there see we have strong labs and talented students.”

Gallo, whose lab is at Rose Hill, said the program also helps foster collaboration across the University, providing the means for Reisner to work in labs on both campuses in addition to Columbia.

“She’s a Lincoln Center student so this mechanism also provides the opportunity for her to travel up here to Rose Hill and be a part of my lab, where she also does her work and interacts with Rose Hill students,” said Gallo.

Jason Morris, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Center, agreed that both campuses are benefiting from the program.

“In addition to all the student research we mentor here at Lincoln Center, we’ve had several of our students in this program this year. In years past we’ve had informal arrangements with major research institutions around New York, so we are very pleased that the Research Office is formalizing some of those relationships,” said Morris.

Mapping it Out

 Reisner’s specific area of interest deals with mapping physical connections in the brain.

“By mapping the connections, I hope to understand the energizing of behavior in pursuit of a goal,” she said. “For example, overcoming obstacles to obtain food and water, or working hard all semester long to get A’s.”

In the brain, the ventral pallidum and nucleus accumbens are regions critical for many types of motivated behavior. While there is evidence linking them to motivation, little is known about the function of the different neurons within them and how they connect to the rest of the brain, she said. Specifically, she’s focused on cholinergic projection neurons of the ventral pallidum in an attempt to figure out which neurons throughout the brain connect to them specifically.

“If we know who sends information to them, we can then study what the function of that connection is,” she said.

To create a visualization of the map, the general practice is to inject a genetically engineered virus that infects the cholinergic neurons to make them glow with a fluorescent protein that helps in the visualization. The virus then jumps only to cells directly contacting them and those cells, in turn, express the fluorescent protein.

“We can then look for fluorescent neurons all over the brain and establish where they are located and what kind of information they may be passing along to the cholinergic cells,” she said. “Piecing this together may help us understand not only how motivated behavior works, but also may provide clues on how to alter it in cases where it is maladaptive, as in drug abuse, depression, ADHD, schizophrenia, and other disorders.”

Gallo concurred.

“In the field, we have a saying, ‘Neurons that fire together wire together.’ In the future this study may provide a map on where we need to focus, where we see robust connections of the neurons of interest,” said Gallo. This may open many new research avenues for our students.”  

Researching from Experience 

Reisner knows from personal experience that science and research can make a difference in the lives of people suffering from a variety of motivational disorders.

“I have really bad anxiety and I’ve struggled with it since I was a kid,” she said. “It’s a panic disorder and I’m very open about it.”

Her grandfather wasn’t as fortunate. She said that growing up in Alabama she witnessed how hard it was for him get the correct medications. She also noted how social stigma exacerbated an already difficult situation.

“I’m thankful that I’m not growing up in the ’70s and ’80s when we didn’t understand mental health as well as we do now,” she said.

Today, she said she and her family understand that mental illness is by and large genetic. She said her grandfather has good days, bad days, and some days where he doesn’t want to leave the bed.

“People thought, especially being the man of the household in Alabama—people think that you’re crazy and people think that you are incompetent,” she said. “And just the way he’s kind of overcome this and now he’s so much better is inspiring to me.”

She said that finding the right medication is key, and a key part of why she does her research. She said he went through “a million different medications and treatment plans.”

“I just wish he didn’t have to go through all of that to find what’s actually wrong,” she said. “And then for me, I relate to a lot of it with him because we struggle with a similar issue.”

Back to Work

Returning to campus just before the semester started, Reisner swung by Lincoln Center’s newly renovated lab with her parents and talked about her experience.

“At Lincoln Center, all of my science professors know my name and they know what I’m interested in,” she said. “And then at Rose Hill, I had this opportunity where I can go into a lab and they know exactly what I’m interested in studying. And then they can kind of work with me and say, ‘Okay, you’re very unique because you like this. So, how about we put you in contact with this professor,’” she said, adding that they also connected her with a professor that got her into the Fordham-Columbia program.

She said that she’s happy to be back at Fordham and appreciates the opportunity that the collaboration has afforded her.

“It’s amazing how we can be in collaboration with Columbia and I can still be in a specialized school like Fordham where everybody knows my name, everybody knows what I like to do, everybody knows my interests.”

Gallo said that being a part of a collaborative effort is an important aspect of research that must be taught alongside the science.

“The collaboration provides outcomes for our lab, but it also helps expose students to other scientists,” he said. “It’s also about talking to people and being in the mix, being a part of New York’s neuroscience community. It gives students an idea of where they want to go in the future and career possibilities they may want to explore.”

“In physics, we have a long tradition of theory and using mathematical models to describe complex systems. As neuroscience has been growing, it’s been bringing in a lot of people with training outside of biology to use some of that theory. I’m one of those people,” he said.

Albanna’s work combines physics, information theory, and statistical mechanics. The idea is that the same models that are used to predict the movement and interactions of atoms can also be applied to neurons as they’re interacting with each other in the brain.

Finding Order in the Chaos

“At a certain scale, that firing looks totally chaotic and random. But at the right scale, we can figure out what particular brain regions are doing, what your mind as a whole is doing, and how all that chaos comes together to give you a nice, predictable behavior,” he said.

In “Minimum and Maximum Entropy Distributions for Binary Systems with Known Means and Pairwise Correlations,” a paper he recently published in the journal Entropy, Albanna showed the range of entropies possible for neural models with specific properties.

In physics, entropy is a thermodynamic quantity that represents the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy that can be converted into mechanical work. Information theory provides another interpretation: entropy is also a way to measure the degree of uncertainty about the state of a system, or conversely, how much information we would need to understand exactly what state the system is in.

Albanna said that one way to comprehend that uncertainty is to imagine a standard cell phone contract. If one yes or no question’s worth of information is known as a “bit,” a 10-gigabyte cell phone plan is equivalent to about 100 billion bits – the answers to 100 billion yes or no questions – that the plan allows you to ask. Entropy describes everything else outside of that 100 billion.

The models borrowed from physics are referred to as “maximum entropy models,” Albanna said, because they are the models with the largest degree of uncertainty that are still consistent with the data at hand.

“People use the entropy of these models as a way to characterize how good a job these models are doing,” he said. “They’ll ask, ‘Does the entropy of the neural activity, or what you’re actually seeing in a real recorded data set, match up with what your model is predicting?’”

When it comes to modeling in physics, there are many reasons to feel confident that when the entropy of a system and the entropy of a model appear to match, the model is an accurate fit. It’s a lot harder in neuroscience though, because one can never really be sure which variables are the right ones to use in the model. Often, Albanna said, researchers pick whatever they can measure.

“You pick how often a neuron fires, but usually, you’re sort of groping around in the dark. You put your variables in and try to figure out whether you’re doing a good job. And you say, ‘Look, it matches up pretty well; the entropy is close.’ But we don’t know how poorly you could do.”

In his study, Albanna found that if a population of neurons behave interchangeably in a statistical sense, then any model consistent with the data gathered from monitoring of the cells will be a good fit in terms of the entropy. If this condition does not hold, the range of possible entropies is broad, and so these maximum entropy models are really capturing something important about the data.   

“It put some of these things that we are starting to take for granted in neuroscience on a little bit firmer footing, and showed we’re not cheating ourselves when we say these things do well,” he said.

The Gap between the Spikes

Another recent project that Albanna completed, a collaboration with a researcher from New York University’s School of Medicine, addresses the complexities of hearing.

Prior experiments with rats showed that it’s common that upon hearing a sound, only half the cortical cells in a part of the brain responsible for sound perception activate consistently. Though it may be tempting to focus exclusively on the cells that “light up” when prompted, Albanna said that’s a mistake. There is much to be learned from the other cells, he said.

“In fact, there are ways to show that these cells actually do respond. It looks like they may not be doing anything when you look through one lens, but if you look through the lens of our analysis, you can see that, in fact, they do carry information, at levels that are comparable to what those responsive cells are carrying.”

To do this, Albanna chose not to focus on the spikes that one sees when cells are activated. Instead, he focused on the gap between the spikes, known as the “interspike interval.” That’s where he found subtle differences that he said show how a particular cell is encoding information.

It’s still not clear what role the cells play in influencing rat behavior, but Albanna said the findings, which he and his co-author are submitting to the journal Nature Neuroscience, are an important first step.

Challenging Assumptions

Looking ahead, Albanna is in the process of developing graduate-level classes to accompany the undergraduate-level physics classes he teaches; the first will likely focus on psychophysics, which is the neuroscience of how perception works, for both through hearing and vision. He said he loves the field because unlike physics, it’s extremely young and in flux.

“There’s so much we don’t know, and so much of how you approach neuroscience depends on your perspective. Like, does this cell matter or not? We don’t always have concrete experimental answers to these questions yet, so you have to sort of build your view the best way you can, and then make sure that you’re always checking yourselves and challenging your assumptions,” he said.

It was no wonder, then, that those same kids devoured popular comic books—even religious ones—the first chance they got.

Last month, a former faculty member donated two-dozen rare copies of old Catholic comic books to the library’s archives. The books were from the series Treasure Chest and Topics, and had been distributed and widely read in Catholic schools from the 1950s to the late 1960s.

Donor Bert Hansen, Ph.D., said he bought the comics to research how medical heroes were depicted in American comics and other popular culture mass media.

Popular culture and medicine

“Public libraries don’t collect comic books, so they don’t get saved,” said Hansen, author of Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media images and Popular Attitudes in America (Rutgers, 2009). “Since I was looking for popular images related to medicine and doctoring, the comic book was where it was at—that, and Hollywood movies.”

Hansen, who taught in the Department of Natural Sciences at the Lincoln Center campus in the 1970s, said he limited his purchase of hundreds of comics to those that featured medical stories. The Catholic comics often featured American heroes with medical accomplishments, such as Walter Reed, Jonas Salk, and Albert Sabin, as well as plenty of “medically relevant saints.”

“What made the Catholic books different is that they included a saint in almost every issue,” said Hansen, a professor emeritus of history at Baruch College. “There was the Mother Cabrini story; there was Marguerite d’Youville, (who ran the General Hospital of Montreal) who was recently canonized. And there’s a story about Father Lazzaro Spallanzani, an 18^th-century biologist and physiologist.”

Touchy topics

LoSchiavo said she was an “avid reader” of the comics as a child growing up on Long Island. She welcomed the collection for an additional reason: “Besides Treasure Chest’s puzzles, games, lives of the saints, and devotional prayers, it also attempted to deal with issues like juvenile delinquency and social unrest at a time when these topics weren’t easily discussed in Catholic grammar school,” she said.

For now, Hansen is glad the fragile bits of memorabilia are safely stored in a temperature-controlled environment. But he also hopes their presence will inspire more donations of Catholic popular culture.

“As a historian, I hope we might find alumni who have some of these comics in their attic and didn’t know the library would like them,” he said. “What people might perceive as some funny old things are actually of interest to librarians, archivists, and scholars.”