天美传媒

Dr. Daniel Llano is a professor in the  at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology’s Neurotechnology for Memory and Cognition Group. He is also a physician-surgeon at Carle Illinois College of Medicine. His field of professional interest is systems neuroscience.
 studies the mechanisms by which complex sounds like speech are processed by the auditory system. He hypothesizes that the auditory system generates internal models of the sensory world and uses these models to extract meaning from complex sensory stimuli. One potential neuronal substrate for this generative model is the massive system of descending projections from the auditory cortex to virtually every level of the subcortical auditory system. These projections are critical for shaping the response properties of neurons in the auditory periphery, but very little is known about their functional organization. 

He employs electrophysiological, novel optical, and advanced anatomical approaches to study the projections from the auditory cortex to subcortical structures. One specific set of issues concerns the role of different cortical subnetworks in complex sound processing. For example, neurons in both cortical layer 5 and cortical layer 6 project to subcortical structures, and the neurons in these layers have very different intrinsic, integrative and synaptic properties. Llano's work explores the different roles that these groups of neurons play in processing complex sound. 

Llano also has a strong interest in studying the reorganization of such networks during neuronal disease. In particular, his lab is developing models of stroke and age-related auditory network dysfunction for the development of novel therapeutic approaches.
His patient care work is focused on aging and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
Research interests:


Computational biology




Imaging


Neurobiology


Optogenetics


Sensory processing


Aging-related diseases


Neurological and behavioral disorders


Education


M.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 


Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Florin Dolcos is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a full-time faculty member at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
He performed his Ph.D. research in cognitive and affective neurosciences at the University of Alberta’s Centre for Neuroscience and Duke University’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, and his postdoctoral training in cognitive, affective, and clinical neurosciences at Duke University’s Brain Imaging and Analysis Center. Dolcos joined the University of Illinois following an assistant professor appointment in the University of Alberta’s Department of Psychiatry.
Research 
Dolcos researches the neural correlates of affective-cognitive interactions in healthy and clinical populations, as studied with brain imaging techniques such as functional MRI and ERP. His program can be divided into the following main directions:

Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Impact of Emotion on Cognition. 
This direction investigates the mechanisms underlying the enhancing and impairing effects of emotion on various cognitive/executive processes (perception, attention, working memory, episodic memory, decision making). A novel direction emerging from this research investigates the neural mechanisms linking and dissociating the opposing effects of emotion. This is important because they tend to co-occur in both healthy functioning and clinical conditions. For instance, enhanced distraction produced by task-irrelevant emotional information can also lead to better memory for the distracters themselves. Also, enhanced memory for traumatic events in PTSD can also lead to impaired cognition due to increased emotional distractibility.

2. Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Impact of Cognition on Emotion. 
The impact of cognition on emotion is typically exerted as cognitive control of emotion, or emotion regulation. This direction is corollary to my first direction, and is important to pursue, because optimal cognitive control of emotional responses is a key component of healthy emotional behavior, whereas maladaptive regulation strategies constitute a core feature of affective disorders. Thus, in our studies we also manipulate emotion regulation strategies (e.g., suppression, reappraisal, attentional deployment), to investigate the regulatory mechanisms mediating the beneficial or detrimental impact of emotion on cognition.

3. Neural Mechanisms of Emotion-Cognition Interactions in Social Contexts. 
My research also targets mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in social contexts. This newly emerging direction in my research program is also important, because proper processing and interpretation of emotional social cues are key components of successful social behavior. Therefore, we are also investigating the neural mechanisms of processing emotional information as social cues, and of their impact on behavior.

4. The Role of Individual Differences in Emotion-Cognition Interactions. 
Although the first three lines of research have clear clinical relevance, it is important to also directly investigate the very same issues in clinical cohorts. Therefore, my research program also includes collaborations with clinical researchers that investigate neural mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in patients with mood and anxiety disorders (depression, PTSD), as well as investigation of changes associated with therapeutic interventions. Investigation of individual differences, however, is important not only for understanding clinical conditions, but also for integrative understanding of the factors that influence individual variation in the vulnerability to, or resilience against, emotional and cognitive challenges leading to disturbances. Thus, in my research, I have also investigated the role of gender, age, personality, and genetic differences in emotion-cognition interactions. Especially relevant are emerging large-scale studies using comprehensive behavior-personality-brain approaches emphasizing integrative understanding that is critical for the development of training and preventive programs aimed to increase resilience and reduce vulnerability to emotional disturbances.

I received a PhD from University of California-Berkeley and completed a post-doc at the Muscle Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2018, I moved from Colorado State University to the Aging and Metabolism Research Program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF). This move to OMRF was prompted by its growing reputation as a leader in aging research. At OMRF, I retained the title of Full Professor and in 2023 became the Department Chair of the Aging and Metabolism Research Program. My expertise is in skeletal muscle, aging, mitochondria, stable isotope labeling, proteostasis and drug and lifestyle (primarily exercise) interventions. My work with tracers and in muscle aging is nationally recognized and has led to many collaborations, extensive mentoring, and leadership positions. Our work is almost exclusively focused on prolonging the period spent in good health (i.e., healthspan) by targeting mitochondrial energetics and proteostatic maintenance. Specific ongoing projects in the lab include cell-type specific proteomic maintenance, how to improve skeletal muscle recovery in aged muscle after a period of disuse, how metformin has different effects on muscle mitochondria depending on overall metabolic health, and the DNA replication in myonuclei (a cell type previously thought to be post-mitotic). Along with my own research, I co-direct the Multiplexing Protein Analysis Core (MPAC) within the NIA-funded Oklahoma Nathan Shock Center and am part of the leadership to help direct the Center’s efforts. I am also involved in leadership and activities of the Oklahoma Center for Cellular Metabolism (NIH COBRE), and the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center.

Sreemathi Logan, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and a researcher in the Oklahoma Center for Geroscience and Healthy Brain Aging. At the Center for Geroscience, she also directs the Animal Model Development and Behavioral Analysis (AMD-BA) core as part of the Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (CoBRE) grant. Her career in research has encompassed many aspects of aging, including her early work on Alzheimer’s disease in the initial characterization of the 5x FAD model generated by Dr. Robert Vassar at Northwestern University Chicago. The current focus of her research lab is to pursue mechanisms underlying cognitive dysfunction associated with age and neurodegenerative disorders. More specifically, she is interested in the role of astrocyte mitochondrial metabolism and redox status that alter the astrocytic phenotype and increase gliosis during aging. Through her research, she has demonstrated that age-related decline in IGF-1, a neurotrophic factor, impairs cognitive function that correlates with a decline in mitochondrial energy production and increased oxidative stress. Using advanced methodologies, she has made significant advances in addressing and characterizing the heterogeneity in cognitive function that occurs with age. Her lab also has the unique capability of characterizing mice based on their cognitive status (impaired or resilient), which mirrors the inherent susceptibility (or resilience) found in the aging human population. She also performs stereotactic delivery of compounds directly into the hippocampus to investigate localized effects on learning and memory. Logan earned her doctorate in cell biology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in geriatric medicine, both at the OU College of Medicine.

 is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Her fields of professional interest are language, memory, hemispheric differences and cognitive neuroscience.
Certain sensory stimuli — words, pictures, faces, sounds — seem to immediately and effortlessly bring to mind a rich array of knowledge that we experience as the "meaning" of those cues. Federmeier's research examines the neurobiological basis of such meaning, asking how world knowledge derived from multiple modalities comes to be organized in the brain and how such information is integrated and made available for use in varied contexts and often in only hundreds of milliseconds. To study these time-sensitive processes, Federmeier uses event-related brain potentials, or ERPs, supplemented by behavioral, eye tracking, and hemodynamic measures.
Research areas:


Language processing


Semantic memory


Aging


Research interests:


Neurobiological basis


Hemispheric differences


Electrophysiology (EEG, ERPs)


Education

Ph.D., cognitive science, University of California at San Diego, 2000