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Theoretical physics and clinical neurology are as distant as black and white for you? Well, maybe. But than we need gray. Gray matters.
June 11, I started to write for my first blog “M.A.D. Lab Blog”, which I now moved to SciLogs. Initially, my blog was named “M.D. Lab Blog”. But as I am not a medical doctor, although I blog about migraines, I inserted later my middle initial, i.e., the letter A, in the blog name not to confuse MD for a degree.
I have no problems being M.A.D., nonetheless, I changed the name to Gray Matters. Because it does, but more on this later.
So just to be clear, although I blog about migraine, I cannot provide or comment on help in migraine treatment, in particular medication or other forms of migraine pain relief. So why am I writing this blog?
In my first post, I wrote:
»For good or bad, public understanding of science becomes more and more an essential prerequisite for both getting adequate funding of research activities and finding a permanent faculty position. To my mind this is actually a good thing because the rapidly expanding Internet technology allows scientist to easily reach out to the public.«
So you see, I am selfish. I am getting something back here. In fact, I will not even spend much time writing this blog. Frankly, in many cases I will just copy and paste text from my research proposals and job applications. There, I have to provide a clear flow of thoughts starting from the broadest scope of my research. Or I write down the stories I use to enrich my teaching. I’m confessing here, because I want to motivate my colleagues to do the same, not because I’m such an honest person. Moreover, I get emails every other week from people asking about their migraines and what I think. So, this blog actually safes me time for I can refer to it.
This is pursuant to the mission state of SciLogs
»… As an important part of our culture and society, science is never isolated. Informing about new results and recent developments as well as the dialogue with the public are characteristics of good scienc.«
I am very happy to be now in this new exciting environment.
Two more answers.
What am I doing? In short migraine and stroke research. More specific, my current research focuses on problems at the interface of neurology and applied physics. My vision is to design control methods that prevent progressive recruitment of cortical tissue (gray matter!) into dysfunctional states occurring during migraine with aura, i.e., migraine with visual hallucinations. In the last three years, I became interested in stroke, where “killer waves” (really this was a name I read in Nature Medicine lately) worsens stroke outcome. I model these waves with mathematical equations.
So why “Gray Matters”? Well, my work is on neural pattern formation in gray matter, as I mentioned above. My approach can be paraphrased as single cells do not get migraines nor do they suffer from stroke for that matter. Yet, mathematical modeling is often done on the single cell level. Furthermore, models mostly look at dynamics on a time scale of milliseconds.This time scale matters most when it comes to normal brain functioning. But not so in migraine or stroke. There minutes or evens days are important.
Thus, I investigate patterns of neural activity evolving over several centimeters (inches, if you wish) over along periods. These macroscopic scales are the scales of gray matter, the tissue consisting of the cell bodies.
So far the first blog post introducing myself and some of the topics I will write about. In the meantime you are invited to browse through older posts on M.A.D. Lab Blog. I am looking forward to hearing back from you.
By the way, you may want to read my blog in German Graue Substanz.
