Saturday Science Lecture on 24 February Titled
"Brain Repair: Hopes and Challenges"

NOTICES: 1) If you are planning on attending this lecture and parking at the Eisenhower Auditorium, please identify yourself as a lecture audience member to the attendants. This will exempt you from the $4.00 parking fee that will be charged to people attending a concurrent event at the McCoy Natatorium. 2) Although this event was originally scheduled to take place in another building, it has been RELOCATED to 100 THOMAS BUILDING where the other lectures of this series have been held.

19 February 2007—A free public lecture titled "Brain Repair: Hopes and Challenges" will be given on Saturday, 24 February 2007, by Gong Chen, assistant professor of biology at Penn State. The lecture will take place from 11:00 a.m. to about 12:30 p.m. in 100 Thomas Building on the Penn State University Park campus. The event is the last of five weekly lectures in the 2007 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science, an annual series designed as a free minicourse for the enjoyment and education of residents in Central Pennsylvania communities. The theme of the series this year is "Broken Brains: New Research on Brain Disease Is Revealing How the Healthy Mind Works."

During his lecture, Chen first will discuss exciting recent findings on stem-cell research and then will focus on recent discoveries concerning neural stem cells. "It has been thought that every single neuron in a mature brain is important and not replaceable, but recent studies have established that thousands of neurons are added to the adult brain every day. Some of the new neurons are successfully integrated into the adult brain and participate in normal functions such as learning and memory," he says. Chen will discuss the potential uses of neural stem cells in therapies for treating neurological disorders, as well as the potential pitfalls that may be encountered during the development of these treatments.

Chen's research focuses on how neurons in the brain connect with each other to conduct the flow of information from one neuron to the other. He also studies how the neuronal connection sites, called synapses, are modulated by neuronal activity. Chen recently has launched a new project on adult neural stem cells, with the goal of molecularly modifying stem cells for rapid brain repair after injury.

Chen's research was recognized with an Ohse Award for Excellent Basic Research from Yale University in 1995 and a National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health while at Stanford University in 1999. He is a member of the American Society for Neuroscience, the American Heart Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Ray Wu Society for Life Sciences. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and he has served as ad-hoc reviewer for NSF research proposals. He is a reviewer for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hippocampus, the Journal of Physiology, Biotechnique, the Journal of Neurophysiology, Synapse, and the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.

Chen received a bachelor's degree in biology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, in 1987 and a doctoral degree in neurobiology from the Shanghai Institute of Physiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University from 1994 to 1997 and at Stanford University from 1997 to 2001. He joined the faculty at Penn State in 2002 as an assistant professor of biology. He is a member of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neurosciences in the Penn State Neuroscience Institute.

The 2007 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science are a free minicourse consisting of five consecutive lectures focused on recent research on the structure and function of the human brain. Audience members who attend the consecutive lectures will gain an understanding of how the study of brain disease is helping researchers to make new discoveries about normal brain function. The lecture series is sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science, with additional financial support provided by Pfizer Inc.

Thomas Building is located at the intersection of Pollock and Shortlidge Roads on the Penn State University Park Campus. Free parking is available in the Eisenhower Parking Deck behind Eisenhower Auditorium.

For more information or access assistance, contact the Eberly College of Science Office of Public Information by telephone at (814) 863-0901, by e-mail at science@psu.edu, or click on the web link at http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/frontiers.

[ B K K / L A K ]