Saket Vora

And by exciting, I mean pretty much on steroids. It keeps things interesting anyway. Right now I’m putting together a short (3 slide, limited by prof) presentation for my neuroscience class. I’m presenting on a Nature article from last August that describes the work that Dr. Karl Deisseroth is doing here at Stanford. It’s pretty amazing stuff — cutting edge. Stimulating or suppressing neurons is an extremely important aspect of treating neuropsychiatric diseases. A fairly common procedure these days is the implantation of a deep brain stimulator that periodically shocks a portion of the brain. By doing ’something’ to the neural connections in this area, debilitating tremors in Parkinson’s patients can be suppressed. Anyway, what Deisseroth’s group has done is found a way to cause and suppress neural signals using optical technology. ChR2 and NpHR are two bacterial rhodopsin proteins that are activated when light is shined on them. Using viral vectors to deliver the genes that express these proteins to specific neuronal cell types, these rhodopsins can become present in the neural membrane. Using a small fiber optic cable inserted into the brain, Deisseroth’s group can achieve millisecond scale bi-directional control of how and whether neurons fire or not. This is huge because now an electrode can be used to monitor membrane potentials without being interfered by what usually is the instigating electrode. Amazingly enough, the expression of these rhodopsins do not affect normal cell membrane properties, and the level at which they can perform targeted delivery of these genes is stunning. This presentation is on Monday.

So starting tomorrow is Entrepreneurship Week (http://eweek.stanford.edu) and there is a five day ‘Imagination Tournament‘ that hundreds of students from around the world take part in. The goal: you are given an everyday ordinary product and asked to create the most value out of it. Last year it was a pack of Post-It notes. It was announced in my strategy class that we have to participate in it. Our groups have to put together a 3-minute video of what we do and upload it to YouTube. I could honestly do without the extra work, considering that I’m already a bit behind on my power amplifier project and I’m heading up to Seattle Thursday night for the GSEC competition at the Univ. of Washington. (Oh yeah, I was asked to interview for an Accenture intern position, but the only day they are at campus is next Friday…when I’m in Seattle. Fun!). In another strategy class project, I have a group that is doing a case study on Palm Inc. On Tuesday a partner and I are going to Elevation Capital to meet with Roger McNamee, a principle there and board member for Palm. Also got an interview with a Palm executive in charge of strategic alliances. So that’ll be pretty cool.

My suitemate Luke is hosting a prospective Ph.D student in psychology. Ricardo flew in tonight from NYU, but he’s currently a student at an Italian university. He has dual citizenship in Brazil and Germany. His CV is already pretty amazing…first author on 6 conference proceedings, spoken at 9 conferences, has done research stints at 5 institutions spanning four countries. His subject area is psycholinguistics, and has done work with both adults and with infants. He’s deciding between Stanford, Brown, UPenn, and NYU. I’m hoping he comes here!

Next Sunday after I get back from Seattle the EEP crew arrives in town; I’ll join them for lunch and give them a tour of campus. Jordan will get to catch up with them when they visit Apple. Death Cab tickets go on sale that Sunday too, I hope to get some for their SF show. Things are a going.