Alex DiFeliceantonio
@difeliceantonio.bsky.social
580 followers 120 following 130 posts
Assist. Prof. at Virginia Tech. My lab studies brain/metabolism interactions in food reward. Scifi reader. Plant killer. She/her DONNUT: https://fbri.vtc.vt.edu/research/labs/difeliceantonio.html
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difeliceantonio.bsky.social
If you are from the Wilmington, NC area Kerr Avenue and Topsail Beach.
merriam-webster.com
What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?
Reposted by Alex DiFeliceantonio
filipkmorys.bsky.social
Hey everyone! Join our journal club on October 10th (12pm EST) to discuss two short papers on weight stigma and language.

JC is drop in format: come once, come when you can.

Reach out to @shanaadise.bsky.social or myself to get the zoom link and papers. Please share!

@ssibsociety.bsky.social
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
It’s so wild that I just followed @diane.dianeduane.com on here. I’m pretty sure the So You Want To Be a Wizard series is the entire reason I love sci-fi and fantasy today. I loved it so much.
alannamode.bsky.social
Give folks their flowers

No, I mean right now. Go tell someone you loved their work right now. They're on social media just say it, it has never been easier

"They know how much people love--" no they don't go say it right now to a composer or artist or game dev or writer or anyone AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
As someone currently in academia, Katabasis was absolutely brutal and absolutely spot on.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
Recorded remarks were also played at the NIDDK AC. Did he attend any of the ACs live?
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
Are you going to Obesity Week? It starts on Election Day! If you are in VA that means you’re missing the Governors race. You can still apply for an absentee ballot! Or vote early at your local elections office.
Image of Virginia absentee ballot envelope with address of Roanoke city election office.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
That’s the norm in Europe. You do a masters and then your PhD is shorter. It’s not an all in one like is the norm in the US where you get a masters along the way.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
Thanks! This was Matt’s baby but he’s not on here so I gave it my best skeet try. lol.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 This work definitely doesn't happen without NIH funding. This study was supported by many R01s and foundation funds. This type of study is expensive and it takes time, but we need studies like this to advance human neuroscience. Sustained, stable funding, is how this gets done.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 I am forever in awe of any patient that works with us in the operating room or in the epilepsy monitoring unit (our other work).
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 I was only a very tiny part of a huge effort. This paper combines neurosurgery, modeling to generate monoamine predictions, modeling of human behavior, and pulling it all together. This work is not possible without patients agreeing to participate in research during an extremely vulnerable time.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 It also tells us something new about how monoamines regulate reward processing in patients with Parkinson's Disease. But, we don't know everything! We need a lot more studies investigating coordinated neurotransmitter release patterns that support human decision making in complex tasks.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 There is a lack of evidence suggesting broad monoaminergic dysfunction in ET, so this gives us a window into "normal" functioning of monoamines we could never get otherwise. These findings add to a growing literature that DA & 5HT, in humans, seem to work in concert to underly reward processing.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 What does it mean? This task involves someone making you an offer to split $20. You can accept or reject the money. Logically, you should accept all money, but when the split gets more unfair, people tend to reject it. This task is really complex, combining reward and judgements of fairness.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 If you take monoamine AUC after each social offer and perform a singular value decomposition (SVD) the latent dimensions can seperate patient groups. We (really Paul) followed this up with logistic regression, testing the contribution of each monoamine and found 5HT AUC drove this serperation.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 The electrochemistry technique allows simultaneous measurement of DA, NE, and 5HT. When you ask how monoamines track these NPEs, you see a stark difference between patient groups (essential tremor and Parkinson's disease)
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 Alec Hartle took these data and noticed an interesting pattern. During surgery for DBS implantation patients played a social exchange game while recordings were made from carbon fiber electrodes in the caudate.
The structure of this game allows you to fit a norm prediction error to the behavior
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
🧪 I might be the only author on Blueksy, so here we go.
Serotonin in the caudate while doing uniquely human things (a social game) provides information about movement disorder diagnosis.
This work started a long time ago with Ken (when he was at Wake Forest) working with Read at VT.
rdcu.be/eDDPf
Caudate serotonin signaling during social exchange distinguishes essential tremor and Parkinson’s disease patients
Nature Communications - Measurements of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine in the caudate of conscious humans reveal a neurochemical boundary between patients with essential tremor and...
rdcu.be
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
It’s guns. It’s guns. It’s guns. Regulate the guns.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
Increasing clockwise hair starting with the sphinx.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
I looked this up becuase I was like well maybe it sounded real, but it was "spicy pepper, the tail of the red lizalfos, and four hylian shrooms." The first one is an in game item, but there are real spicy peppers, the other two defintely only exist in the game, not at all in the real world. woof.
difeliceantonio.bsky.social
They told us the plan was Roe, Obergefell, Loving.