Author Archives: Eleni Gourgou

As we approach the date of April 20, when the 7th Midwest C. elegans meeting is taking place in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Eleni and Scott Leiser are the organizers, see also here) the event website is now on! The site is currently under construction, so please stay tuned!

Vikas is defending his PhD thesis on Monday, December 3. Congratulations, Vikas! Dissertation Title: Towards Better Navigation Oral Defense Date and Time: Monday, December 3, 2018, 9:30 AM Oral Defense Location: EECS 3316 Advisor: Jason Corso, Associate Professor, EECS . See here what Vikas, Shurjo, Jason and Eleni are collaborating on.

Check out the latest entry at WormPress, which Steel composed.

Each week ArtsAtMichigan features a Haiku of The Week in their newsletter. Eleni’s composition was featured as this week’s haiku: Scope, gene, phenotypedetails extend our limitsawe; this life’s secrets (click on the  image below) You can find it here (published on November 15). Have you come up with a haiku on worms, biology, research? PleaseContinue reading “Eleni’s “haiku of the week”!”

Eleni is delighted to host Prof. Eduardo Izquierdo, Assistant Professor at the University of Indiana, for a visit and seminar talk at Mechanical Engineering Dept, on Tuesday, November 27.  Here is a link to his page and here is the announcement for his talk: Izquierdo Announcement.

Shurjo Banerjee and Vikas Dhiman, both PhD students with Jason Corso (EECS-UoM), have joined forces with us. They are using data analytics and machine learning to analyze worms recordings in mazes. This will help us decipher the worms locomotion features and learn more about their navigation abilities. We are very excited to have Vikas andContinue reading “A new collaboration”

We have two new students on board! Himaja Motheram, freshman, Computer Science Major and UROP student, will be working on the C. elegans maze project. Bo Xue, Master’s student in ECE of Electrical Engineering Department, will be working on using machine learning to barcode fluorescent C. elegans. Welcome, Himaja and Bo!

Eleni was awarded a grant from the University of Michigan Office of Research (UMOR) Faculty Grants and Awards Program, to work on 3D-printing Agar-Based Hydrogel for use in C. elegans Behavioral Assays. Allen Hsu (Medical School) and Kira Barton (ME Dept) will be our collaborators, and Steel Cardoza (senior, Materials Science and Engineering Dept) willContinue reading “New internal grant to work on 3D-printing agar for use in C. elegans behavioral assays!”

Eleni’s career award is featured at Mechanical Engineering Dept news website:

Our paper titled “A mathematical and computational model of the calcium dynamics in C. elegans ASH sensory neuron” (Ehsan Mirzakhalili, Bogdan Epureanu, Eleni Gourgou) is now accepted for publication in PLOS ONE! Update: Our paper is now available online: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201302