(March 22, 2019) — To celebrate 50 years as San Antonio’s urban serving university and to thank San Antonio for its support and commitment to higher education, UTSA is presenting its 50th Anniversary Scholars Speaker Series throughout 2019, featuring experts on a broad range of contemporary issues that impact society.
On Tuesday, March 26, the speaker series will continue with Amina Qutub, associate professor of biomedical engineering. Her talk, How Daily Habits Can Impact Brain Health, will introduce the latest advances in science and technology to illustrate how daily behaviors influence the ability of brain cells to repair and regenerate, enabling a future that optimizes brain health. The event is free and open to the public.
>> Learn more about this Scholars Speaker Series.
Qutub’s research aims to understand and improve health by interpreting human cells’ communication during process growth and regeneration. Her research team is developing tightly coupled experimental-computational methods to identify fundamental mechanisms of cell communication in the bone marrow and brain. That work has clinical applications to hematological cancers and neurodegenerative disease treatments.
“A critical first step in optimizing brain health is reproducibly assessing it,” said Qutub. “We launched the Quantu Project, a large-scale human subjects study that tracks daily habits and behaviors like sleep, and asks whether these habits influence the ability of new brain cells to form. To study brain cells in a way that is specific to an individual volunteer without harming them, we model how stem cells reprogrammed from blood form networks of neurons.”
Qutub received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco. She completed postdoctoral training in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine then served on the faculty at Rice University. She joined the UTSA faculty in fall 2018.
She is currently a member of the joint UTSA/UT Health San Antonio Graduate Group in Biomedical Engineering and the UTSA Brain Health Consortium. She is also the co-founder of DiBS, an adaptive data visualization startup.
>> Discover groundbreaking research happening at the UTSA Brain Health Consortium.
How Daily Habits Can Impact Brain Health is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Mar. 26 at The McNay Art Museum, 6000 N. New Braunfels Ave., San Antonio, Texas 78209. Doors will open and a cash bar will be available at 6 p.m. Attendees will have an opportunity to meet the speaker following the presentation at 7:15 p.m.
