Lapate receives Regent’s Junior Faculty Fellowship Award

 

Dr. Lapate received the Regent’s Junior Faculty Fellowship Award, which is granted by the UCSB Academic Personnel Office to support junior faculty during the development of their pre-tenure research and creative work. This award will support the lab’s research on the organization of the prefrontal cortex in emotion--with a focus on time-emotion integration for cognitive control & affect regulation.

 

Lapate presents at SoCal Learning & Memory Conference

 

Dr. Lapate was an invited speaker at the annual SoCal Learning & Memory Conference at UCLA. Her talk, “Temporal memory and adaptive emotion” was the first public talk on a new and growing line of research in the lab on the intersection of emotion and temporal processing. This line of work, co-led by Mengsi Li & Jingyi Wang, examines the bidirectional interactions between emotion and temporal coding and memory using a multimodal approach that includes behavioral, EEG, peripheral-physiological and fMRI measures. Stay tuned for more!

 

Joanne and Mengsi to give talks at SANS!

 

Mengsi’s Li’s work “The dynamics of affect and temporal memory across event boundaries” was promoted to an Oral Symposium presentation (Temporal Dynamics of Emotion symposium) at the annual meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS). Moreover, Joanne Stasiak’s work on emotion-action interactions “Emotion for Motion: The Open-Loop Pathway and Amygdala-Prefrontal Contributions” was selected as a flash talk/conference highlight. Congratulations, Mengsi and Joanne!

 

LEAP Neuro lab paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

 

Our lab’s first theoretical paper is now published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (TiCS), where we asked: Do temporal & emotional processing interact? We proposed they do–with consequences for adaptive functioning. In this new paper, we detail recently-unveiled features of amygdala-hippocampal projections suggesting that high-intensity emotional events may distort temporal coding. Written by Dr. Lapate in collaboration with LEAP Neuro Lab postdoc (& originally NHP neuroanatomist) Dr. Jingyi Wang and long-time friend and collaborator Dr. Arielle Tambini.

Check it out here:

The tie that binds: temporal coding and adaptive emotion
 

Grant on emotion-motion interactions for the study of Parkinson’s awarded

 

A large multi-site grant examining the neural bases of emotionally-modulated motor function was awarded by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) foundation! This three-year multi-institution project led by the University of Pittsburgh (PI: Peter Strick; UCSB CO-I: Scott Grafton, UCSB Consultant: Regina Lapate) will support basic affective neuroscience work by the LEAP Neuro lab centered on emotionally-motivated action. Congrats, team!

Read more here:

Probing a Parkinson’s Paradox
 

The LEAP Neuro lab meets in person!

 

Following our university reopening and Covid-19 vaccines being more widely available, the core members of the LEAP Neuro Lab (Dr. Lapate, Dr. Jingyi Wang (postdoc), Mengsi Li (2nd year graduate student) and Joanne Stasiak (1st year graduate student) met in person for the very first time! We can’t wait to get started.

 

Lapate awarded Academic Senate grant

 

Dr. Lapate was awarded an Academic Senate grant for 2021-2022, titled “Time and emotion integration in the human brain” which will support a new project in the lab on retrospective emotion and temporal memory led by first year graduate student Mengsi Li. Congratulations, team!