Matt Gaidica: Engineer Turned Neuroscientist
Matt Gaidica grew up in Detroit and got his Electrical Engineering majoring in Robotics Degree in Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. After graduation, he involved himself into the world of start-ups. He co-founded Landr, a software that modifies websites to fit mobile phones. Once the company sold, Gaidica started living in Silicon Valley and working on another start-up named Syllabuster, which gives college students a deeper insight into which courses they should take. After Syllabuster received funding, Gaidica soon grew tired of the start-up field.
He then wrote a book, entitled “Left: A history of the Hemispheres,” which explains the origins and implications of asymmetrical features of the world around us and within our own bodies.
“There’s a pattern out there for everything. It’s not just luck, it’s not just randomness that everything in this world happens. It’s just really a matter of figuring out the pattern.
With the publishing of this book, he decided to devote his life to studying the brain. In 2014, he joined a laboratory in the University of Michigan, where he is getting his Ph.D. in Neuroscience. (Neuroscientist) He works on Parkinson’s disease and is trying to find the relationship between the spikes and ripples that neurons can produce, which in turn can ultimately influence the development of therapies.
According to his website, his ethos and research interests are as follow:
RESEARCH INTERESTS
In 2009 Michael J. Fox hosted a documentary called Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, traveling the world in the name of research, health, and happiness. In one episode he visited Bhutan, a Buddhist nation on the Himalayas’ eastern edge, where he described a sudden alleviation of his Parkinson’s disease symptoms.
“I don’t know whether that’s from the altitude, or from the medication I’ve taken for the altitude sickness, or whether it’s just, Bhutan.
Fox’s anecdote was of particular interest because my graduate research was focused on the brain circuits involved in Parkinson disease, but it began me wondering. What are we doing at these extremes? Are we living or are we dying?
I am excited by the thought that extreme pressures from the environment can augment internal physiology for better or worse. Exploring this unique relationship is full of medical, scientific and technical challenges. Despite a rich understanding of how the body reacts to these situations, we know very little about the brain, especially in regard to electrical activity.
My doctoral research in Leventhal Lab leveraged in-vivo electrophysiology and optogenetics to investigate how distinct neural pathways contribute to motor function. My findings described how neural activity coalesces to enable ballistic movements precisely in time (Gaidica 2018). My post-doctoral research in Dantzer Lab is focused on extending this work to understand how performance and fitness are enhanced through sleep. I do this using novel bio-loggers that record physiology and behavior. Using these devices, I can begin to answer several questions related to how animals perform in extreme environments and what coping mechanisms they employ to stay fit for the varied challenges of the wild. These insights have profound implications from basic science to the fields of human performance and resilience.
CAUSES & ETHOS
I live by the words, wake up, be you, do good.
-
Fitness & Wellness. There is one intervention that unanimously works to address obesity, age-related cognitive and motor decline, stroke recovery, depression, […the list continues]: move. I have served as a Health Ambassador to Project Healthy Schools for two years—teaching youth about food and lifestyle choices—and continue to seek opportunities to motivate people towards the best proven prevention and treatment strategy we have available.
-
Conservation & Limited Impact. There is nothing quite as important than preserving nature. This means that exploration has to be conducted with little impact to the environment (see Leave No Trace) and the undeclared value of the wild must be respected. I’ve contributed to Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, and try to embody their adage, “Explore. Collect. Protect.”
-
Code for Good. I believe doing good takes many forms. I like the idea that we can all help from anywhere, and that charity is maximized when we leverage our expertise. Over time, I’ve spent more effort answering questions on Quora, MATLAB forums, and contributing to my own weblog.
Article Sources
