Melanie Gainey
STEM Librarian Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh PA
Melanie Gainey is a trained neuroscientist and spent over 10 years studying the plasticity of neural circuits in sensory cortex.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
At CMU Libraries’ biomedical hackathon with DNAnexus, open science and collaboration won
Technical.ly online
2023-10-24
Melanie Gainey, a CMU Libraries librarian for biological sciences, said since the participants are mostly — but not exclusively — academics, Ph.D. students, and graduate students, research is a natural part of the event. Throughout the hackathon, participants use publicly available datasets to create open-source pipelines and then get all of those outputs published on GitHub.
Media
Social
Industry Expertise
Accomplishments
Outstanding Postdoc Award, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at U.C. Berkeley
2016
Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows, National Institute of Health
2014
Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards for Individual Predoctoral Fellows, National Institute of Health
2008
Education
Brandeis University
Ph.D.
Neuroscience
2010
Boston University
B.S.
Biology
2004
Affiliations
- Society for Neuroscience
Links
Articles
Exploratory mapping of tumor associated macrophage nanoparticle article abstracts using an eLDA topic modeling machine learning approach
PloS one2024
The role of macrophages in regulating the tumor microenvironment has spurned the exponential generation of nanoparticle targeting technologies. With the large amount of literature and the speed at which it is generated it is difficult to remain current with the most up-to-date literature. In this study we performed a topic modeling analysis of 854 abstracts of peer-reviewed literature for the most common usages of nanoparticle targeting of tumor associated macrophages (TAMs) in solid tumors. The data spans 20 years of literature, providing a broad perspective of the nanoparticle strategies.
Fostering Data Literacy Teaching with Quantitative Data in the Social Sciences
Ithaka S+R2022
Quantitative literacy is an essential twenty-first century skill that universities are heavily invested in teaching to students. The social sciences play an important role in these efforts because they attract students who might otherwise avoid data and mathematically oriented courses and because they ground quantitative reasoning in political and social contexts that resonate with undergraduates.
Implementation and assessment of an end-to-end Open Science & Data Collaborations program
F1000Research2022
As research becomes more interdisciplinary, fast-paced, data-intensive, and collaborative, there is an increasing need to share data and other research products in accordance with Open Science principles. In response to this need, we created an Open Science & Data Collaborations (OSDC) program at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries that provides Open Science tools, training, collaboration opportunities, and community-building events to support Open Research and Open Science adoption.
The Evolution of Information Literacy Outcomes in Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Science Courses
Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship2019
The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy presents opportunities for moving beyond ‘one-shot’ information literacy sessions and creating a more scaffolded and embedded approach for instruction. We collaborated with faculty at Carnegie Mellon University to create Framework-inspired information literacy learning objectives for first-year and third-year science undergraduates and are continuously refining the objectives as the curriculum continues to evolve.
Rapid Disinhibition by Adjustment of PV Intrinsic Excitability during Whisker Map Plasticity in Mouse S1
Journal of Neuroscience2018
Rapid plasticity of layer (L) 2/3 inhibitory circuits is an early step in sensory cortical map plasticity, but its cellular basis is unclear. We show that, in mice of either sex, 1 d whisker deprivation drives the rapid loss of L4-evoked feedforward inhibition and more modest loss of feedforward excitation in L2/3 pyramidal (PYR) cells, increasing the excitation-inhibition conductance ratio. Rapid disinhibition was due to reduced L4-evoked spiking by L2/3 parvalbumin (PV) interneurons, caused by reduced PV intrinsic excitability.
Multiple shared mechanisms for homeostatic plasticity in rodent somatosensory and visual cortex
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences2017
We compare the circuit and cellular mechanisms for homeostatic plasticity that have been discovered in rodent somatosensory (S1) and visual (V1) cortex. Both areas use similar mechanisms to restore mean firing rate after sensory deprivation. Two time scales of homeostasis are evident, with distinct mechanisms. Slow homeostasis occurs over several days, and is mediated by homeostatic synaptic scaling in excitatory networks and, in some cases, homeostatic adjustment of pyramidal cell intrinsic excitability.
