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Well, this perfectly mediocre season has been a bit of a letdown for the Giants, just a year after a tremendously fun season. However, this final home game of the season is probably the best game we’ve attended as a lab. (Sadly, no one remembered to take pictures on June 7, though that game was pretty boring anyway.)

In this case we got to hang out together on a sunny day with a great view, also with some very cute kids and both garlic fries and regular fries. And a really fun game with lead changes, action (Giants ended multiple innings with double plays to wipe out a runner crossing the plate) and an extra-innings walkoff with a play at the plate! Can’t wait for next year!

It’s Postdoc Appreciation Week again! Clara Sanches and I went out for a coffee and a chat. While trying to avoid talking about her upcoming SfN poster, we got to discussing Julia Brown’s great recent book launch event, through which I learned from Clara about Esmé Weijun Wang’s fascinating collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Really looking forward to checking it out once this coming set of grants is in!…

I recently had the chance to give two presentations about neuroethics, which (for better or worse) are recorded on YouTube. On April 5 I was invited to the University of Washington Electrical & Computer Engineering Colloquium to present on “Patient experiences with implanted closed-loop neuromodulation as inputs for human-centered design”–had a wonderful series of very interesting conversations with faculty in engineering and in bioethics during my visit to Seattle:

On April 9 I got to participate in a great panel discussion as part of the Science Ethics and Policy Symposium on the UC Berkeley campus, with the always-thoughtful Sara Goering (yes of course, also at UW!) and moderated by Narayan Sankaran:

It’s time again to gather and send off another member of lab to the next stage in their career. But this time, Clayton won’t be going far. To further an interest in data science that Clayton developed during his time in Decision Lab, Clayton is staying at the Memory and Aging Center but moving to our MAC Technology Team! We look forward to bombarding Clayton with late-night emergency requests about password resets, network drive mounting errors, file backups and journal article permissions. Hopefully Celeste lets him stay on lab Slack…

We had a very successful but exhausting week in lab, submitting a grant application and also hosting Roy Hamilton for two inspiring talks about diversity, equity and inclusion in neurology and about noninvasive brain stimulation in aphasia syndromes. It was especially great to host Roy in person given all the work he’s done to inspire and inform our efforts at creating a more inclusive lab, Memory and Aging Center, and Department of Neurology.

To celebrate we gathered for our first lab lunch in a long while, also celebrating UCSF’s return to work and our beautiful new office space in the Weill Neurosciences Building, which we finally get to enjoy together. So glad to be able to share each others’ company and conversation with delicious dumplings!

I got to have another great conversation with Dr. Jeff Ratliff for the Neurology journal podcast. When he had me on last time to talk about dementia ethics more generally, I wasn’t able to talk yet about the position statement that our committee has been preparing to address the many challenges raised in decision-making regarding this controversal new drug. In this discussion we considered how to counsel patients and families given the drug’s lack of established benefit, known harms, potential negative effects on the entire Medicare system, and health equity concerns given the exclusion of Black, Indigneous and Hispanic patients from pivotal clinical trials. At the end, Dr. Ratliff asked a tough question about a scenario in which a patient really desires treatment; I did my best to illustrate how frameworks of shared decision-making may be helpful in such situations.