KSU's Brain Health Research Institute

Kent State University’s Brain Health Research Institute is nestled within the Integrated Sciences Building, but it reaches across campus. Staff and students from 27 departments are researchers within the institute, working on interdisciplinary studies about brain health and diseases.

“It’s not just life sciences, such as biology, chemistry, physics, not just the physical sciences. It’s social sciences, like psychology, sociology, arts, humanities,” says Michael Lehman, the institute’s director and professor of biological sciences. “All those are disciplines where faculty are fundamentally interested in how the brain works.”

The institute launched in 2019, but its physical space opened to researchers, both students and staff members, last fall. It includes a common space, conference room, individual labs and “collaboratories,” which are open-concept spaces where researchers can communicate across disciplines while sharing lab space and resources, encouraging collaboration.

“To have that sort of diversity of research is really a cauldron for creativity,” he says.

Lehman explains the institute and some of the research done there.

Processing Center

Students now have a relaxed space to hang out — a common area with tables, cushy chairs and a wavy 3D ceiling design meant to mimic brain waves.

“Nothing substitutes for actually having the space where you can have social events or lunches, or just gatherings to talk about ongoing research or sharing information, study groups, whatever it is,” Lehman says. “That’s where it’s really made the difference.”

One of the most important additions to the institute is the collaboratories.

“We decided that we would try to create these shared core facilities where investigators from multiple disciplines came together,” he says, “and give them the technology they would need to really make groundbreaking discoveries.”

The first collaboratory is the neurocognitive collaboratory for human subject research. It features behavioral testing rooms where students, community members and patients can come to participate in studies that staff or students are performing focused on higher funtions of the human brain like human cognition, sensory function and movement. There is also an open lab without walls so researchers can work together.

“You’re close enough so you can ask questions and see what’s going on,” Lehman says. “You gain from that exposure.”

The other collaboratory is the neuroimaging collaboratory that has advanced light microscopes, including multifluorescent microscopes with image analysis software.

Then there’s the light sheet microscope. It’s currently the only one in Northeast Ohio, and it allows for a 3D visualization of a specimen rather than the typical thin 2D sections.

“This is a microscope that allows us, instead of taking individual sections, we’re going to take whole brains — whole rat brains, mouse brains and actually whole chunks of human brain,” he says. “This captures the whole brain for us in a matter of hours.”

And since Kent State is the only area institution to have one, members of the institute’s partners, such as Northeast Ohio Medical University, Akron Children’s Hospital and Cleveland Clinic, have come to use it.

“We also extend beyond Kent State,” Lehman says. “It’s multi-institutional, as well as multidepartmental.”

Core Knowledge

Each of the two collaboratories houses its own vein of research.

The neurocognitive collaboratory is designed for human subject research about “how we think, learn, experience emotions,” Lehman says.

In that collaboratory, there is a neurocognitive testing room. Angela Ridgel, the associate director of the institute and professor of health sciences, has used it for her research related to Parkinson’s disease. She has brought in bicycles, created in collaboration with engineers, to study the effect of controlled movement on function in Parkinson’s patients.

The neuroimaging collaboratory, which features multifluorescent microscopes, has been used by one student who is mapping out different neurons in healthy animals versus animal models of disease. And the light sheet microscope has been used for research ranging from spinal cord injuries to reproductive issues.

Lique Coolen, the director of the neuroimaging collaboratory and professor of biological sciences, has used the light sheet microscope to study how to improve function in spinal cord injury patients, and Lehman and Aleisha Moore, an assistant professor of biological sciences and institute faculty member, used it to study the location of neurons in the hypothalamus that’s involved in reproduction and see if there were functional differences.

“In addition to serving faculty, bringing them together, we also want to train students,” Lehman says. “We want to get students that kind of interdisciplinary perspective.”

Staff members have trained some students to use the light sheet microscope, including Lehman’s daughter, a high schooler in a College Credit Plus program who is now a sophomore at Kent State and was trained by Moore while conducting research.

Students are involved in professors’ research in the collaboratories, and other examples of student research done by the institute’s undergraduate fellows are projects focused on topics like auditory perception, learning methods, neurodegenerative diseases and more.

“This is really assembling a world-class group of scientists, studying different aspects of normal brain function and relationships with disease,” Lehman says. “Kent State has this great tradition, essentially, of training students who’ve gone on to really contribute a lot in terms of our understanding of brain health and neuroscience.”

The Brain Health Research Institute hosts the 10th annual neuroscience symposium Oct. 27 and 28. kent.edu/brainhealth

Top of Mind:

Here’s what some of this year’s summer institute undergraduate fellows researched.

Alaya Kiser, a neuroscience major, studied the effects of spinal cord injuries on sexual and bladder functions.

Speech pathology and audiology major Gabrielle Williams researched adolescent auditory perception.

Samantha Zaborowski, a psychology and neuroscience major, studied how elementary school kids learn about fractions larger than whole numbers and how procedural and conceptual learning methods affect understanding.

Medical technology major Zoha Shaikh researched mechanisms involved in mitochondrial impairment in neurodegenerative disease and worked to identify potential therapies.