Happy New Year

Dear Readers:

I wish you a happy New Year! I always find that the beginning of the new year is a great opportunity to make exciting new plans. What are your plans? Here are my plans:

(1) Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). We just got a state-of-the-art TMS setup with neuronavigation, dual pulse capability, research coil with sham mode etc in our Carolina Center for Neurostimulation. This is the year we are getting serious about space, given that we have mostly focused on time. In other words, we continue to be excited about the temporal resolution of EEG and the advantages of tACS to modulate temporal structure. However, clearly, spatial resolution also matters for understanding the brain, so by starting to do functional MRI and TMS, we will have a way to measure and perturb the brain with high spatial resolution. This will be exciting!

(2) Further advance the convergence of our preclinical animal work in the Frohlich Lab with our human research in the Center. One of the main theme across the two groups is our interest in thalamo-cortical rhythms, in particular the alpha oscillation, and how it relates to arousal, brain state, and attention. We will expand on the use of tasks that we can do both in humans and animal models to accelerate our convergent neuroscience approach.

(3) Our Carolina Neurostimulation Conference. We will very soon have an official website, but for now I am happy to share with you that we have 17 speakers who have agreed to come. 12 from the US and 5 from abroad. More importantly, there are 9 male and 8 female speakers! Just compare this to the meeting this past Spring in Barcelona - just saying... For now, please save the date May 21-23, more information will be available very soon!

(4) My company, Pulvinar Neuro, had a great first year. We sold our XCSITE 100 stimulator to researchers across the country and we have received very positive feedback about how easy it is to do gold-standard (double-blind, placebo controlled) tACS/tDCS research with our device. That was exactly the plan! We are selling the device at a very competitive price since the company does not spend funds on marketing. I am hoping to grow the company in a way that we will see many more well-done, double-blind tDCS/tACS studies in 2018!

(5) My collaboration with the Inspel Spital in Bern (Switzerland) is starting to take shape and I am greatly looking forward to spending some time in Bern this year to advance this transatlantic cooperation. More to come!

(6) Publish the results from the clinical trials we have recently completed. Cannot tell you much more here at this point, but if you are curious what we have been up to, I encourage to search clinicaltrials.gov for more info! 

I am very excited about these plans and I hope that many of you will be part of these plans, our conference will be a great venue to get to know me and meet my fabulous teams in the Lab and the Center.

Hope to see you May 21-23 in Chapel Hill!

Take care,

Flavio