UCSF Grad Slam: This is Your Brain on Your Mother Tongue

A competition to make research more accessible

“Grad students are a critical part of the research ecosystem here at UCSF and across the world,” said Vice Provost of Student Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate Division Nicquet Blake, PhD, at last week’s event.

“The past few years have only reinforced that it’s really important for scientists to be able to make their often complex and specialized work accessible to a broad public,” Blake said. “We hope that the skills the students have acquired in preparing to give their talks and the poise they have gained from engaging in this challenging communication exercise will serve them well no matter where their career path takes them.”

Bhaya-Grossman works in the lab of Edward Chang, MD, chair of neurological surgery at UCSF. For more than a decade, Chang has worked to develop brain-computer interfaces with the aim of restoring speech to people who have lost their ability to speak due to conditions like stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Most recently, Chang and his team made international headlines after one of these brain-computer interfaces was paired with a digital avatar, allowing a stroke survivor to speak with facial expressions for the first time in 18 years.

“Our lab,” Bhaya-Grossman explained, “has the unique opportunity to work with patients whose brains are being monitored by very small electrical sensors that a neurosurgeon places underneath their skull directly onto their brain surface.”

Fluent speakers can detect the boundaries of words

Monitoring volunteer participants’ brain activity, Bhaya-Grossman and lab mates found that they could tell when people were listening to their mother tongues or a foreign language. She then used machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to analyze these signals and uncover patterns.

She found that our brains track where one word ends and another begins or what Bhaya-Grossman calls “word boundaries.” Still, our minds are best able to do this when we understand the language we’re listening to.

“This is a major step in demystifying the magic that allows us to understand spoken language,” she told the audience. “It’s also an important reminder that when we encounter something that our brain does that feels magical, we can pull back the curtain to reveal the complicated and fascinating work being done behind the scenes to make it all happen.”

The work may help better inform our understanding of language disorders one day.

A tie for third place and the People’s Choice Award

Her talk, and her artistic use of language in describing it, earned Bhaya-Grossman the first prize of $4,000. She will go on to represent UCSF in the UC-wide Grad Slam in a May 3 event hosted by UC President Michael Drake.

Simone Kurial took home the $2,000 second-place prize for her talk on how mice regrow essential parts of their livers. She hopes the work contributes to future liver disease treatments.

And a Grad Slam “first” saw Sydney Williams and Reuben Hogan tie for third place, each taking home $1,000. Featuring a photo of her delivery driver dad at work, an animated Williams likened the proteins Rab GTPases to the UPS delivery drivers of the eye as she discussed their role in healthy vision and potential mechanisms to treat some forms of blindness.

Second place:

Simone Kurial came in second place with her talk, “If You Can’t Arboretum, Join ‘em: Growing the Biliary Tree from Scratch”

Third place (tie):

Sydney Williams tied for third place with her talk, “Rabs: Delivery Drivers of the Eye.” She was also the recipient of the People’s Choice Award.

Third place (tie):

Reuben Hogan tied for third place with his talk, “Protein Folding is Pretty Sweet.”

Hogan borrowed from Swedish furniture maker Ikea to craft metaphors describing how sugars in cells can make some proteins misfold, which is at the core of Alzheimer’s disease – and novel ways to monitor these changes to understand them better. Williams also won the People’s Choice Award, bagging an extra $750.

UCSF is home to nearly 1,000 PhD students. Each year, thousands apply for graduate studies at UCSF. Only about 1 in 10 PhD applicants are accepted to one of UCSF’s more than one dozen PhD programs in fields like neuroscience, global health sciences, and developmental and stem cell biology.

Within a year of leaving UCSF, about half of PhD students will go to academia, where many will take on post-doctoral positions. Meanwhile, nearly one in three will secure a job in industry.