What an honour and incredible acknowledgment of our research – Thilo received the 2017 E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship Award with five fellow scientists in Canada and across the Natural Sciences and Engineering. This is one of the most prestigious awards for young scientists in Canada, celebrating the critical role of fundamental, basic research for driving innovation. For a write-up about Thilo’s contributions see here. Thank you NSERC, and thank you Canada !! – it was an unforgettable experience to see how Canada’s parliamentarians in the House of Commons acknowledged Scientists and the role of basic sciences for society, and how an impressively knowledgeable Prime Minister Trudeau and Science Minister Duncan succeeded to inspire and impress Scientists on their mission to make a difference to the lives of people in the short- and in the long-term!
Theta and Beta Frequency
Theta and beta frequency range coherence between anterior cingulate cortex and frontal eye field indexes the successful preparation for anti-saccades and maintenance of working memory content – with larger ACC to FEF direction of granger causal information flow! These important findings is now published in Nature Communications by Sahand Babapoor-Farrokhran and Stefan Everling with contributions from Martin Vinck and our lab – This is a particular important finding as neuronal coordination between prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex at the identical frequency ranges characterize successful attention shifts and adjustments following errors – thus there is clear link of prefrontal attentional control signalling to the actual implementation of attentional selection in FEF (and parietal) networks – Congratulations for this major achievement ! The article Theta and beta synchrony coordinate frontal eye fields and anterior cingulate cortex during sensorimotor mapping can be downloaded here .
First Neuropharmacological Contribution
Congratulations to Ali and Mariann for the first neuropharmacological contribution from our laboratory with the article A computational psychiatry approach identifies how alpha-2A noradrenergic agonist Guanfacine affects feature-based reinforcement learning in the macaque . This study first surveys all 14 different tasks that have ever been used with Guanfacine in nonhuman primate studies and than shows in a single case study how rigorous computational reinforcement learning modelling extends existing knowledge by informing about the fundamental learning mechanisms that this drug affects during complex reversal learning. This article is particular important as it paves the way for a more formal computational approach to understand the neural effects of systemically acting psychoactive drugs like Guanfacine (which is uses in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, mild cognitive impairment, and more). Congrats Ali and Mariann and all co-authors that made this study possible!
3 minute Thesis Competition
Congratulations to Ben to win the York University 3 minute thesis competition in presenting his MSc graduation work ! Here is the University’s press release about the 2016 YorkU 3MT Winner ! Good luck from the laboratory when moving to the provincial level competition (still with only 3 minutes…for the whole thesis).
Brain Day at Waterloo University
The 2015 BrainDay at Waterloo University hosted Thilo for a lecture for the neuroscience section. Brainday is a highly inspiring event organized by the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at 
Waterloo and the University to discuss brain topic from four different fields in a unifying daylong setting (Psychology, Philosophy, Systems Neuroscience, Theoretical Neuroscience). The talk at Brainday is freely available as youtube video and is entitled Cells and Circuits Coordinating Attention: Dynamic Circuit Motifs in Primate Prefrontal Cortex.