The sound beneath the waves

If you’ve ever seen a graphical representation of a sound, you are probably familiar with what it looks like: hundreds of steep, tightly packed peaks and valleys, all of different heights, moving above and below a common line of symmetry that cuts horizontally through the middle. “When a sound travels through the air, it basically sets the molecules around us in motion, using sound pressure to create sort of a wave,” says Waisman researcher Michaela Warnecke, PhD.

Peter Ferrazzano named Weygandt Professor

Waisman investigator, Peter Ferrazzano, MD, has been named the first recipient of the Enid and Jerry Weygandt Professorship in Pediatric Critical Care.  Ferrazzano, a Waisman investigator, leads the UW Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine which provides state-of-the-art care to all critically ill children admitted to American Family Children’s Hospital. The Weygandt Professorship will be front and …

Lauren Bishop, PhD – Slide of the Week

Although epilepsy commonly presents with autism in children, it is currently unknown whether established estimates represent the prevalence and incidence of epilepsy in autistic adults. Our objective was to use population-level Medicaid data to determine prevalence, incidence, and antiepileptic drug use associated with epilepsy in a unique population of autistic adults aged 21+ with (N=2,738) and without (N=4,775) intellectual disability and to compare results to adults with intellectual disability alone (N=18,429).

Barbara Bendlin, PhD – Slide of the Week

In Alzheimer's disease (AD), neurodegenerative processes are ongoing for years prior to the time that cortical atrophy can be reliably detected using conventional neuroimaging techniques. Recent advances in diffusion-weighted imaging have provided new techniques to study neural microstructure, which may provide additional information regarding neurodegeneration.

Stem cells can repair Parkinson’s-damaged circuits in mouse brains

The mature brain is infamously bad at repairing itself following damage like that caused by trauma or strokes, or from degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. Stem cells, which are endlessly adaptable, have offered the promise of better neural repair. But the brain’s precisely tuned complexity has stymied the development of clinical treatments.

Karla Ausderau, PhD – Slide of the Week

Examine healthcare usage, pharmacy prescriptions and healthcare cost among people with Intellectual Disability in Wisconsin who participate in Special Olympics compared to people with Intellectual Disability who do not participate in Special Olympics. In addition, a sub-analysis was completed to compare Special Olympics athletes who participated in the Healthy Athlete program to those who had not.

New initiative to study Parkinson disease

Su-Chun Zhang, MD, PhD, the Steenbock Professor in Behavioral and Neural Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Waisman Center investigator, is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers selected by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative to receive $9 million over three years for the “Parkinson5D: Deconstructing Proximal Disease Mechanisms Across Cells, Space and Progression” or PD5D project.

UCEDD – Slide of the Week

Title: Pre- to post-training change in childcare provider belief that developmental monitoring is important and ability to identify appropriate referrals to make when there is a developmental concern Legend: Training in developmental monitoring significantly increases childcare providers’ ability to identify the child’s doctor as an important referral, and their ability to name at least one …

Andrew Alexander, PhD – Slide of the Week

Demonstration of the ability of MPnRAGE to correct for severe motion artifacts in a 7 year old girl.  Retrospective motion correction greatly reduced motion-induced blurring in both  structural T1-weighted images and quantitative T1 maps.  The correction greatly improves the reliability of brain imaging measurements in children.  The plots indicate the estimated amount of head motions that were corrected.

Waisman Biomanufacturing partners with GigaGen to manufacture new COVID-19 drug

Waisman Biomanufacturing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison will begin manufacturing a new drug to treat and prevent COVID-19, developed by California-based biotech company GigaGen. The drug, called GIGA-2050, uses a new approach similar to treating COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma, or blood products from people recovering (convalescing) from an infection. Waisman Biomanufacturing was created to facilitate just this sort of development and testing of new types of drugs.