Melanie Gainey
STEM Librarian | Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, UNITED STATES
Melanie Gainey is a trained neuroscientist and spent over 10 years studying the plasticity of neural circuits in sensory cortex.
Biography
As a trained neuroscientist, Melanie Gainey brings research expertise to her role as library liaison to Biological Sciences, Computational Biology, Biomedical Engineering, and the Neuroscience Institute. Melanie spent over 10 years studying the plasticity of neural circuits in sensory cortex while receiving her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Brandeis University and my postdoctoral training at U.C. Berkeley. She enjoys teaching information literacy and working on evidence synthesis projects. In her role as Director of the Open Science & Data Collaborations Program, Melanie helps develop and support open science initiatives for the CMU community.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Biological Sciences
Biology
Open Science
Neuroscience
Library & Information Science
Media Appearances (1)
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
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Industry Expertise (3)
Research
Education/Learning
Library and Information Management
Education (1)
Brandeis University: Ph.D., Neuroscience
Links (4)
Articles (5)
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.
