Collaborations
Working with the Grass Foundation has included the development of a workshop series dedicated to educating faculty and students on principles of neurophysiology. These workshops have been distributed across the Southwest in hopes of building understanding of neurobiology and electrophysiology amongst various educational groups ranging from universities, community colleges, and high schools. This is bolstered by Dr. Ricoy's relationship to the Grass Foundation as the Director of Outreach Initiatives.
Ulises Ricoy collaborates with the Marine Biological Laboratory with The University of Chicago in Woods Hole, MA. This collaboration includes the instruction of Neural Systems and Behavior course focused on electrophysiology and low-cost techniques, especially in electric fish.
Backyard Brains works to provide low-cost equipment for neuroscience education including oscilloscopes and amplifiers for EMGs, EEGs, and EKGs. Working with BYB, we have distributed hundreds of kits for students education, including through collaboration with grade-school education. The technology of Backyard Brains supports many of the educational endeavors in Ricoy Lab. Ricoy Lab works to determine new applications of these tools for interrogations of the nervous system.
Backyard Brains is not an official sponsor of the Ricoy Lab, only a fantastic collaborator which helps provide material for our research and outreach endeavors.
Molly Matty
Molly Matty is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Chalasani Lab at the Salk Institute. She will be starting as an assistant professor at the University of Portland in Portland, OR in Fall 2022. Her lab of undergraduates will seek to understand how non-pathogenic gut microbes affect behavior and physiology in the nematode C. elegans.
Dr. Matty earned her PhD in Genetics and Genomics from Duke University in the Tobin Lab, where she investigated the host immune response to mycobacterial infection using zebrafish as a model system. She is committed to research mentorship, education, and equity in science. She hopes to use these passions to develop curricula and research opportunities for undergraduates. Through her collaboration with the Ricoy lab, we will develop further low-cost approaches to engage with neuroscience research.
For more information about Dr. Matty and her efforts to unveil the hidden curriculum of academic science, check out her website.
Jorge Gomez
Jorge received his bachelor’s degree in Biology from The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in 2009. He then went on to pursue a doctoral degree in Neurobiology from UTSA under the supervision of Dr. Carlos Paladini. During this time Jorge’s work focused on studying how astrocytes of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) control the firing activity of dopamine and GABA neurons via glutamate release. Currently Jorge is collaborating with the Ricoy lab to develop a low-cost approach to analyze video data using python programming language.