ISCN 2019 Speaker Highlight: Dr. Frank Middleton

How does our microbiome affect our brain? 🦠🧠 – – At this year’s ISCN event, Dr. Frank Middleton will be presenting on The Microbiome and Microtranscirptome of Early Stage Parkinson’s Disease. – – Dr. Frank Middleton is Director of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience Department at SUNY Upstate Medical University where he holds appointments as Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Biochemistry, and Pediatrics. He is also the founder and director of the SUNY Molecular Analysis Core facility at that institution and Chief Section Editor of Frontiers in Genetics and Frontiers in Psychiatry, a statistical reviewer for the Journal of Neurochemistry, an ad hoc reviewer for more than two dozen other journals, and a regular member of NIH study section review panels for more than a decade.   Transcription: – Hello my name is Dr. Jessica Lofgren, and today we are joined by Dr. Frank Middleton. Dr. Middleton, How are you doing today? – I’m doing very well, thank you. – Good, so I brought you on today because you are speaking at this year’s International Symposium on Clinical Neuroscience happening in Orlando, Florida May 24 through the 26th. Now you might be new to some of our scholars so could you tell us a little bit more about yourself. – I would be happy to. So I’m a neurobiologist and a geneticist and I study brain disorders. And I’ve been doing research on the brain for about 25 years. I also am the director of the graduate program in neuroscience at our university. Which is Upstate Medical University, and I direct many of the medical school courses here. And have directed other courses in the past that are specifically focused on neuroscience or neurobiology or genetics and genomics. – Very interesting, so what topic did you pick to talk about this year at The International Symposium and why did you pick that topic? – So one of the things that is most interesting to me and I thought would be of particular interest to this year’s attendees. Is to explore the relationship between the microbiome and neurological disorders. And this is something we have done a lot of research in my own lab, with regard to Parkinson’s disease, but also autism and we’re beginning to look at it in other conditions and disorders. And the microbiome is something that a lot of people have become interested in recently because it refers to the bacteria that live in you or on you. And there’s a lot of signaling that takes place back and forth between the microbiome and your tissues and organs. And what we’ve now realized is that a lot of that signaling effects brain function and behavior. So its particularly relevant to focus some attention on exploring what we can learn from studying the microbiome. That might inform us about brain disorders and conditions, And overall brain health. – Well that sounds very interesting, I can’t wait to hear more about what you have to say on this topic. If you wanna hear more from Dr. Frank Middleton, make sure you join us at The International Symposium on Clinical Neuroscience happening May 24th through the 26th 2019 in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Middleton, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with us today, and we look forward to seeing you. – Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.