A group for Medical Doctors in Neuromatch Academy

Hi MDs! I hope you’re all enjoying NMA and learning tons of new things - I certainly am.

Let me introduce myself first. I’m a medical doctor from Colombia, with a Msc in Clinical Neurosciences from UCL, aspiring neurologist and currently working in epilepsy and neuroimaging biomarkers.

I created this group because I would like to hear your thoughts about NMA, what are you doing to understand the things we never studied during med school, and what are you doing/would like to do for your project. And obviously, e-meet you!

Please join the group and tag other MDs!

Saludos!

Carolina

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Hi, thanks for the initiative. My name is Miguel Angel Rubio, and I am a neurologist in Barcelona, Spain, specialized in neuromuscular disorders (yep, just the neurological disorders that are more far from the brain!), with special interest in ALS. My daily work is focused on clinical assistance and from time to time I have the opportunity to collaborate in a lab with ALS rodent models.
I have null background with python but my purpose on NMA (I’m on the observer track) is to open my vision to other possibilities, understand better certain papers based on computational modelling regarding neurological diseases and find novel ways to work and improve as a scientist. I’ve completed the very first days of the 1st week and it’s quite interesting how also ‘the way of thinking’ as a neuroscientist can be improved listening to the videos or attending to the tutorials.
Also, if any have a project or idea in mind that could think that medical doctors could be helpful, feel free to ask!

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Yay, glad to see some fellow medics around here! I’m Richard, a child neurology trainee currently in London (about to head to Zürich for an epilepsy / EEG fellowship for a few months). I spend most of my time on research tho, currently doing a postdoc in a zebrafish lab where we do calcium imaging to evaluate epileptic brain networks, and then network models to understand them better :slight_smile:

I also hear that @pappyhammer is one of us (my PhD student Dom is in your pod :male_detective:)

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Hi everyone,

Thanks @roschkoenig for mentioning me. My name is Julien Denis, I am a MD, I have done my residency in Pediatrics in Paris, with a special interest for child neurology. I haven’t done a fellowship yet (it lasts two years usually in France), 2 years and a half ago I started a PhD just after the residency, my project changed after 6 months or so, and I have finally joined another PhD student’s project (Robin Dard) focusing on studying how development shapes the functional organization of hippocampal networks, using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging on mouse pups. I’ve studied computer science before getting to med school, and luckily enough it seems like coding is like riding a bike, you don’t forget, so it came back quickly after 10 years on pause. Thus, I get to focus on data analysis and hopefully some modeling on the way.

Regarding Carolina questions, at the beginning of the PhD, I struggle a bit with quite everything, lot of basic science knowledge was long gone, same for maths, I read/watched as much content as I could to catch up (being full time on research helps a lot). Also, when I wanted to learn something, I’ve tried to incorporate it somehow on my project (like I wanted to learn more about deep learning, so we’ve developed a deep learning toolbox for calcium imaging). So far, as my project is quite far from clinical concerns, I feel that my medical training has been quite useless, if not to give me a great amount of motivation to at least gain some useful skills for later on, still hoping that my project will be useful for science.

I would be quite interesting to talk with you all about what are your plans for the longer term (like do you plan to mix research and clinical practice, why research etc… ?)

Personally, I’m thinking about not going back to clinical practice, I really enjoy research. Clinical practice can be quite frustrating especially in neurology. Also in France, it is tough (at least so far as I know) to find a position in an hospital in which you have enough free time for research (so many tasks are already entitled to MD with way too many administrative ones), plus I like to believe that it is tough to be a good clinician and also a good researcher, I would prefer to focus on one. The main argument I have heard from fellow MD against the idea of full time research is the “low” salaries in research.

I’ve always be motivated to get into research, especially neuroscience, but I guess the progress in AI really strengthen this motivation. When I see the situation in child neurology and the lack of therapies for much of the diseases, I like the approach of deepmind, one problem to solve them all.I believe that neuroscience will be useful for child neurology either by studying the physiopathology of specific diseases or by helping better understand intelligence.
On that subject, have you read the book “Deep medicine” by Eric Topol ?

Sorry for that long post, I tend to write too much :wink:

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Hi everyone! My name is Liberty Hamilton, while I’m not a medical doctor, I wanted to introduce myself because I work in close collaboration with clinicians in my lab. I am currently an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Dell Medical School at UT Austin (with joint appointment in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences). I am one of the mentors here at NMA, and my research is related to speech and language processing using intracranial recordings in patients with epilepsy. We also do some work using noninvasive scalp EEG (mostly not in patients at the moment). My lab website is here: https://csd.utexas.edu/research/hamilton-lab

I’d love to talk to anyone here about the interface between clinical and basic science research, and what types of collaborations I have with clinicians (neurosurgeons, epileptologists, and neuropsychologists). Among other things, I’ve worked on basic science research on speech and sound perception, translational/clinical work on electrode localization in ECoG/iEEG, and visualizing seizure propagation in collaboration with epileptologists.

Please feel free to get in touch!

Liberty

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Hi everyone, It’s so nice to meet you.
I’m currently studying my 5th year medicine at Iran University of Medical Sciences. Coding was always fun and interesting to me. I used to write iOS apps during my school time. I’m more interested in doing basic neuroscience research than medical practice, so I’m thinking of PhD after my MD.
I would LOVE to hear your thoughts if you could integrate computational neuroscience with your clinical practice. Is it possible to use and apply the methods for patients? (I think specially seizure cases @liberty.hamilton @roschkoenig @feinstone @cfatuesta )

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Hello everyone,

I’m Amitkumar Choudhari, practicing Radiologist at Tata Memorial Center, Mumbai, one of the major oncology institutes in India.

I’m actively involved with the neurooncology disease management group.

I’m glad to meet you all on the forum. Neurostars and NMA are some inspiring platforms for pursuing neuro- research, using computational techniques.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Amit.

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Julien,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Hi to everybody.

As I said before, I am a neurologist. I do not plan to stay far from patients the next years. We learn a lot from them.

In Brazil, it is very hard to do a Master’s degree (MSc) during medical training. We have a kind of scientific training that eventually has some scholarship during the graduation that we call “scientific initiation”, which lasts from 12 to 24 months and, in my impression, is very similar to the Master (MSc) that exists in other countries. I did “scientific initiation” in a pathology lab (not thinking in Neurology at that time), for 2 years during the medical graduation.

After that, a voluntary work at a Neurology clinic changed my thoughts.

In Brazil, the most common way for a doctor who has made a clinical training to enter this “world of research science” (in a more consistent way) is to do the medical course (MD, step 1), then do medical residency (Neurology, step 2), then do a fellow training (in my case, a fellow in Cognition and Behavior Neurology, step 3), then a master’s degree (MSc, step 4), and then a doctorate (PhD, step 5). I am studying statistical concepts again, and getting into computational mathematics.

Today, I work as a neurologist and in research activities related to my project. I devote also a time in voluntarly mentor new residents and fellows (psychiatry, geriatrics, and neurology).

I am interested in research on digital markers (any of them) for cognitive diseases, and proficiency in using technologies in adults. I hope new computational analysis skills may help me.

If you have any research interests in these matters, I would very much like to keep in touch. =)

@cfatuesta @feinstone @roschkoenig @pappyhammer @liberty.hamilton @Hadi_KM

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Hi everyone,

My name is Yuki Fujishima. I’m a final year medical student at Kyushu University in Japan. So… obviously… I’m not an MD yet… I’m very interested in hearing thought of all of you. But am I qualified to be in this group…?? :thinking:

Yuki

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Hi all,

I’m on the observer group. An early career researcher/post doc in the UK on a funding scheme that allows me 50% clinical /50% research. (Its actually less as am also part-time with 3 young kids for any with a family wondering if sub-dividing ones time so much reduces one to nothing).

My interests are using motor control to understand movement disorders better (particularly dystonia) . To date I’ve found this course exceptional. As a clinician, collaborative projects are much more powerful if we have a common language (maths/coding) by which to access basic neuroscience. So if you are at an early stage any skills learnt on this course will only be an advantage!

Hope everyone continues to enjoy the course and great to e-meet everyone!

Anna

www.annasadnicka.com

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Hi, I am Amit Kumar Garg, in my final year of med school from AIIMS, Delhi, India.
I am not MBBS yet(equivalent to MD)
NMA is really amazing as you rightly pointed out that I have never come across these things in my Med school
I started learning coding and a bit of machine learning from the starting of the year.
I am interested in pursuing research field in computational neuroscience along with a residency
I have started a tweet thread, listing out every day of the neuromatch academy, I will also enlist copied colab notebooks where I would be giving the description of python codes used in the notebook, for all of the doctors or medical students out there, feel free to reach out to that tweet, you might also reply to the tweet for the doubts in specific topics so that we can learn better and my continue the discussions to neurostars

@cfatuesta @alan @feinstone @roschkoenig @pappyhammer @Hadi_KM @amitjc @yukids123

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Hi there NMA fellows,

My name is Jacob Pogson, currently a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, US and I am an audiologist (not an MD I realize, but I am a clinician at heart). I am originally from Australia, where I completed my doctorate in clinical neurosciences studying the vestibular system and saccades after complete unilateral vestibular loss for vestibular schwannoma. I am interested in all things brains, ears, and eyes.

I found that taking data science courses during my doctorate was invaluable for learning how to use models to characterize responses and fully reap the rich data that patients provide us with. Probably preaching to the choir here, I highly recommend learning modelling concepts as much as possible, if not learning to code itself, as it is very helpful—as @asadnick said too—communicating in a common language with more technical colleagues who much more familiar with the deep details of models and maths.

For my postdoc I am studying eye movements in vestibular compensation and adaptation to Meniere’s Disease, which causes hearing and balance problems. I am interested in how the vestibular system maintains homeostasis with a fluctuating sensory organ. I am enjoying sinking much deeper into modelling during my postdoc, however, do miss seeing patients and keeping my research in perspective.

@Hadi_KM my mentor David Zee made his career by fully integrated studying computational neuroscience of eye movements into his clinical practice. He is an example of how to do it. See https://doi.org/10.1186/s40673-018-0081-2

Take care, Jacob.

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Hi folks,

This is Anindita, a medical graduate from India. It’s great to meet so many clinicians into basic research and computation.

We are on the verge of paradigm-shifting discoveries, and I truly believe much more interdisciplinary collaborations and overlapping approaches are needed to understand neuroscience, AGI and the underlying critical philosophical questions.

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Thank you all for sharing! I’m so glad to know there l are more MDs doing NMA!
I hope your first week went well. I went from excitement, to frustration, to feeling overwhelmed, to having “Aha!” Moments, to extreme happiness after completing one exercise without checking the solution, and to feeling very proud of being in NMA and pushing myself very far out of my comfort zone.

I’ve just created a twitter account so we can all stay in touch, share papers, discuss techniques, and perhaps establish future research collaborations! Hope you all join: Twitter is @MDsNeuromatch

Cheers!
Carolina

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Hi everyone!

Thanks @cfatuesta for making this thread! My name is Hayley Drozd, and I’m an MD-PhD student at Indiana University School of Medicine (starting my fifth year out of eight; third year of graduate school). Currently, my thesis project uses behavioral phenotyping, optogenetics, and awake behaving electrophysiology to study ADHD and autism spectrum disorders using a mouse model of Neurofibromatosis type 1. In the future, I plan to apply to residency in Pediatrics (or the combined Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Residency) and pursue computational neuroscience research in the field of developmental disorders.

I was wondering if other MD-PhD students or MDs would be involved with Neuromatch - it’s so great to see everyone involved! If anyone has any advice for a physician-scientist-in-training, it is very welcome! Specifically, how did you decide where to go for your practice and/or residency? And how did you take research interests/potential mentors into consideration when making your decision?

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Hey All,

like @hdrozd, Also an MD-PhD student. Starting my 7th (x_x) year in the program (5th year of Graduate School) at the Tri-Institutional Program between Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Rockefeller University. Currently, my thesis project is focused on recording from medial prefrontal cortex in rhesus macaques while they watch videos of other monkeys socially interacting. I’m really interested in how the techniques we’re learning here can be applied to better understand mental health problems, as I hope to one day to computational neuroscience research while practicing psychiatry, with an eye toward addictions or depression.

Also happy to hear any tips for those who have walked any portion of this path!

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Ah! I totally missed this section. Hey! I am Pranjal Garg, 3rd year MBBS student (so definitely not a MD yet) at AIIMS Rishikesh, India. Since this is the end of NMA, I can confidently say that this is probably the most challenging thing I did in my life, yeah even anatomy was simpler. Specifically in neuroscience I am interested in adult neuroplasticity and adult neurogenesis, but yeah I talk about anything in neuroscience. Anyways you can connect with me on twitter- @NeuroGarg, linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranjal-garg-student/ or you can email me at- pranjaldun@gmail.com

Happy to connect always
Pranjal Garg

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