Brown University

After researchers spent years developing an artificial intelligence technology to monitor lab animal behavior, a team of recently graduated entrepreneurs is investigating its commercial potential.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – Brown undergraduates Adrienne Tran and Max Song didn’t just take Thomas Serre’s machine vision course in Fall 2015 – they ultimately took an innovation from his lab to consider its potential for commercialization.

The technology, which Serre’s lab has developed with Brown colleague Kevin Bath over the last several years, automates the observation of research animals. Normally students and other research assistants must painstakingly review hours of video footage to determine when and for how long a mouse sleeps, wakes, feeds, drinks, grooms another mouse, nurses its pups and so on. Those factors are key to understanding the potential effects of an experimental intervention on the mouse’s behavior.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Brown University is now accepting applications for a new Executive Master in Science and Technology Leadership (EMSTL) program, which is designed to prepare engineering, science, and technology professionals to be successful in industry.

The 16-month program of study is “for highly accomplished professionals with five to 15 years of experience in technical fields who are ready to broaden their impact and achieve greater success as business and organizational leaders,” according to the university.

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With a new five-year federal grant, the Rhode Island Center for Clinical Translational Science will strengthen connections between scientific discovery and health around the state.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Rhode Island’s scientists can deliver the benefits of discoveries more quickly to health care providers and those clinicians can pose more pertinent questions to scientists when they work together closely with broad, deep and cohesive services and support from their academic medical institutions. That’s the vision the Rhode Island Center for Clinical Translational Science (RI-CCTS) will implement with a new $19.5 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The National Institutes of Health has awarded Brown University an $11.5-million grant aimed at bettering the understanding of the genetic nature of such diseases as cancer, severe lung infections and preeclampsia, a serious and sometimes fatal complication of pregnancy.

The five-year grant establishing a new Center of Biomedical Research Excellence will not only fund research but boost collaboration among Brown faculty who specialize in such distinct but related fields as immunology and molecular biology.

All will involve the use of advanced computer analysis, an important new tool of the digital age – computational biology, as it is known in the life sciences.

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