The Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat) will soon launch a multidisciplinary initiative focusing on brachial plexus injuries, called the NeuroMat Action for the Brachial Plexus Injury, or ABRAÇO. This initiative will become a go-to reference for patients, patients’ relatives, health professionals, researchers and educators who are interested in this kind of injury, that has been in the rise in Brazil, especially associated to an increasing number of motorcycle riders and accidents. Leading figures in this initiative are the NeuroMat scientific director, Antonio Galves, and NeuroMat PI, Claudia Domingues Vargas.
Levels of scientific culture are associated to a mass of social phenomena, according to the literature, ranging from economic measures (i.e., innovation rates, development) to sociopolitical indicators, such as political participation and inequality. Not surprisingly, a country’s level of scientific culture, for instance as measured by the 2015 PISA assessment, is strongly associated to this country’s level of science education and normally quality of educational resources produced in this country. From one direction, this means that the lower the level of scientific culture in a country the lower the quality of educational books, magazines, websites and so on that will be produced or available in this country. A recent study has indicated that a country's level of scientific culture is also associated to the quality of contributions from this country to the electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia.
During the last NeuroMat workshop, PI Antonio Carlos Roque presented a project on simulating neuronal behaviors associated to the Galves-Löcherbach model. Computational simulation could provide insights on brain dynamics, especially if the simulated models have very large sizes. Postdoctoral researcher Nilton Kamiji and PhD students Rodrigo Pena and César Ceballos are part of this project; Kamiji also presented on neuronal modeling at the NeuroMat workshop.
The Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics has hosted this month its second workshop, gathering members of the three teams --research, technology transfer and scientific dissemination-- and guests. The event took place at the University of São Paulo with support from the São Paulo Research Foundation and combined short and long presentations, roundtables and working groups. This workshop provided a sense of the evolution of activities and was an opportunity to exchange interdisciplinary perspectives on ongoing and future lines of action. This piece provides snippets of the action at this event, officially called "New Frontiers in NeuroMathematics” and ran from November 22 to 25.
When the São Paulo Research Foundation established the structure of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers it stated clearly that the most important feature of RIDCs was the multiplicity of their missions, a cornerstone for attaining the status of “a world class research center.” Each RIDC must have a specific, high-impact research focus, and this research focus must be necessarily integrated with technology-transfer and scientific dissemination explicit missions. FAPESP's RIDC for Neuromathematics (NeuroMat), that was established in 2013 and is coordinated by mathematician Antonio Galves, reports its third year of activities by emphasizing how the major scientific challenge of building a conceptual framework for neuroscience data informs technology transfer and scientific dissemination.
