UC San Diego (Video)

Having your pregnancy labeled as “high risk” can be frightening, but doesn’t need to be. Dr. Julia Cormano explains common reasons a pregnancy could be considered "high risk," the types of care available, considerations for delivery and more. Series: "Motherhood Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 38255]

Alondra Osuna moved to the United States from Guadalajara, Mexico. Her parents encouraged her academic passions and she set her sights on a college degree. She enrolled in community college then transferred to UC San Diego. She is now in graduate school hoping to pursue a career in college counseling. She shares the insights she has gained as a first generation immigrant student and how to find community on campus as a transfer student. Series: "Education Channel" [Education] [Show ID: 38268]

The county of San Diego has instituted inclusionary hiring practices to recruit neurodivergent individuals to the workforce and ensure departments have the proper skills to interview, train, and work with these members of the San Diego community. Garret Hoff, Brandy Winterbottom, Brian Lafferty, and Megan Elledge-LeVota discuss how this initiative came to be and what it means for the future. Series: "Autism Tree Project Annual Neuroscience Conference" [Public Affairs] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 38394]

How can we better understand the earliest stages of human development? Jianping Fu, Ph.D., University of Michigan, discusses his work using stem cell-derived embryoids. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 38320]

Leanne Chukoskie, Ph.D., Northeastern University, discusses her work using video games and play-based studies to learn more about autism and uncover potential therapies. Play-based relationships in early childhood are some of the primary tools that teach us where to look and find important information. Video games provide an excellent form of environmental learning by incorporating autonomy (user picks the game), purpose, mastery, uncertainty, competition, and peer reinforcement, and they’ve been linked to improvements in perception, visuo-spatial attention, movement skill, and memory. See how Chukoskie uses video games to study behavior, make assessments, and create interventions to help people with autism. Series: "Autism Tree Project Annual Neuroscience Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 38392]

Treatment options for problematic behaviors associated with severe autism are limited. Can cannabidiol (CBD) be an effective therapy? Doris Trauner, M.D., discusses recent studies looking at the use of CBD and how it works in the brain. Series: "Autism Tree Project Annual Neuroscience Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 38393]

Alysson Muotri discusses modeling Pitt-Hopkins syndrome (PTHS) using stem cells and brain organoids. He shares how rescuing TCF4 expression with CRISPR-mediated epigenetic induction of AAV vector delivery provides a gateway for targeted therapeutics for PTHS and related conditions. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Science] [Show ID: 38516]

When not teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, CJ Taylor is part of the Robotics team working on The Institute for Learning-Enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS) at UC San Diego's Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. He talks with Saura Naderi about his upbringing, his early interest in data science and his current position. He also talks about his involvement in projects that benefit the community. Series: "Science Like Me" [Science] [Show ID: 38501]

The American Physical Society has designated UC San Diego’s Mayer Hall as a historic site in recognition of research conducted by physicists Walter Kohn and Lu Jeu Sham on density functional theory. Their development of the "Kohn-Sham equation" inside Mayer Hall became the foundation for the computation of the material properties of electrons and nuclei. Understanding the electronic properties of complex systems is essential to the design and engineering of new materials and drugs. Kohn and Pierre Hohenberg on sabbatical in Paris developed a theorem for the electron ground state energy to depend on the electron density distribution instead of the usual potential energy due to the nuclei. In Building C (later named Mayer Hall), from 1964-66, Kohn and Sham laid the foundation of a computation method, based on a single-particle equation composed of its quantum kinetic energy and the potential energy including the interaction effects. That became the basis for computation of material properties of the electrons and the nuclei. For this work, Kohn received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [Science] [Show ID: 38313]

What is gene therapy and how does it relate to autism? Alysson Muotri, Ph.D., contextualizes the autism spectrum, defines gene therapy, shares how human stem cells can contribute to research, and lays out how gene therapy could be used in the future. Series: "Autism Tree Project Annual Neuroscience Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Science] [Show ID: 38387]