NerdNite[21]: Prescriptions and pampers
Come on down to your friendly local Nerd Nite and throw back a couple of LUCID’s finest cocktails while enjoying the nerdisms of our fabulous speakers and your new nerdy friends. Be there and be square!
Nerd Nite Seattle
Monday, August 19th | 7:30 Talks (Doors open at 6:30)
$5 Cover
LUCID Lounge
Aspirin, Viagra and Beyond: Exploring the history and future of drug discovery
Matthew Shortridge, PhD
You can argue our early human ancestors had limited access to quality health care. Many of the very first medicines were at best ineffective or at worst deadly. However, after thousands of years of trial and error our medical knowledge expanded such that we knew which plants were effective and which to avoid. This process led to the discovery of therapeutic willow bark; which eventually led to synthesis of Aspirin and most recently the entire field of Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAID). Today, drug discovery is a much more robust and precise science. In this talk I will discuss the history, current methods and some future directions of drug discovery.
Matthew Shortridge is an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellow working at the University of Washington. His research interests are centered on using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to study the structure and function of biological molecules, particularly ribonucleic acid (RNA). His current research projects focus on understanding the link between microRNA function and cancer development. Matt is a self-proclaimed beer-geek, enjoys hiking/camping with his dogs Watson and Beaker, and is also an evangelical bicycle commuter.
Babies perceive! and how do we know?
Christina Zhao
Despite the small sizes of their brains, infants process large amount of sounds quickly with great detail every day. Thanks to the methodologies developed over the last few decades, we have been able to ask infants questions such as ‘can you hear a difference between these two sounds?,’ and get fairly reliable answers. Amazingly, infants have proven to us that they are able to process and perceive speech and music sounds to the extent that even adults are not able to. Modern technology allows us to take a step further to look at what happens in the brain while they process these sounds.
Christina Zhao is a PhD student at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, where she studies how infant brains process complex sounds and how early musical experiences influence such processes.
Posted in Uncategorized
