Akron Life October 2022

EDUCATION

“You’re close enough so you can ask questions and see what’s going on,” Lehman says. “You gain from that exposure.” The other collaboratory is the neuroimaging collaboratory that has advanced light micro scopes, including multifluores cent microscopes with image analysis software. Then there’s the light sheet microscope. It’s currently the only one in Northeast Ohio, and it allows for a 3D visualiza tion of a specimen rather than the typical thin 2D sections. “This is a microscope that allows us, instead of taking individual sections, we’re going to take whole brains — whole rat brains, mouse brains and actually whole chunks of human brain,” he says. “This captures the whole brain for us in a matter of hours.”

And since Kent State is the only area institution to have one, members of the institute’s partners, such as Northeast Ohio Medical University, Akron Children’s Hospital and Cleveland Clinic, have come to use it. “We also extend beyond Kent State,” Lehman says. “It’s multi-institutional, as well as multidepartmental.” Each of the two collaboratories houses its own vein of research. The neurocognitive collabora tory is designed for human subject research about “how we think, learn, experience emo tions,” Lehman says. In that collaboratory, there is a neurocognitive testing room. CORE KNOWLEDGE

Lehman says. “That’s where it’s really made the difference.” One of the most important additions to the institute is the collaboratories. “We decided that we would try to create these shared core facilities where investigators from multiple disciplines came together,” he says, “and give them the technology they would need to really make groundbreaking discoveries.”

The first collaboratory is the neurocognitive collaboratory for human subject research. It fea tures behavioral testing rooms where students, community members and patients can come to participate in studies that staff or students are performing focused on higher funtions of the human brain like human cognition, sensory function and movement. There is also an open lab without walls so researchers can work together.

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