Iranian Neuroscientists Community

2010 social meeting, one step closer

to a big goal

Iranian

event will be subsequently available on the SfN web

site and the meeting program. In our annual meeting,
this year for the first time, we will have two travel
awards presented to two researchers (one graduate
student and one post-doctoral fellow) who will
present their research at the meeting. The awards are
named "Jamal Omrani Excellence of Science Travel
Award" in the honor and tribute to Dr. Omranis late
grandfather who avidly encouraged higher
education. Details and eligibility for this award can
be found on page 6.

Neuroscientists Community (IRNSC) was

established as an association for Iranian
neuroscientists to assemble together and to facilitate
collaborations and to enhance scientific
communications. IRNSC is in the 5th year of its
activity and has attracted over 200 members and still
growing. The annual social meetings and dinners
have been major milestones of IRNSC activities.
IRNSC socials and dinners were generally well
attended in the past and we hope to keep it up and
expand on it. These occasions provide the organizers
the chance to deliver an overview on IRNSCs
activities. Besides, this is an excellent opportunity
for new members to meet and share their scientific
interests and accomplishments. Last year, the social
meeting was held in Hyatt Regency Chicago hotel
with approximately 50 attendees. The social was
followed by a casual dinner in a local Persian
restaurant.

To keep members informed of IRNSCs activities, a

periodic newsletter is prepared to provide an
overview of major IRNSC activities over the past
year. Our goal is to publish 4 newsletters per year,
with each issue covering: 1) Current news & views,
2) Biography of an outstanding Iranian
neuroscientist, 3) An introduction to the latest high
caliber scientific paper and its lead author, and 4)
Miscellaneous announcements.

This year, we are having our

5 th social meeting, held
concurrently with the 40th
annual meeting of Society for
Neuroscience (SfN), in San
Diego. The social is held on
Monday, November 15th in
San Diego Marriott Hotel and
Marina from 6:30 to 8:30 P.M. More details on this

Outstanding
Neuroscientists

Iranian

For this issue, IRNSCs organizing committee has

asked Dr. Kamran Khoadakhah to kindly provide a
short biography of his scientific endeavors. Dr.
Khodakhah is a professor of neuroscience in
Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience at
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Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Dr. Khodakhah has an outstanding resume. He
obtained his PhD from the University College in
London under the mentorship of Professor David
Ogden and trained in
Professor Clay
Armstrongs lab at the
University
of
Pennsylvania as a post
doctoral fellow. Dr.
Khoadakhahs
biography is very
interesting and truly
i n s p i r i n g . We
encourage all trainees
involved with
excessively demanding
experimental projects
to read his biography as we are sure they would
find it as inspiring like we did. You can find more
details on Dr. Khodakhahs research at his website.
We will also have a summary of a paper published
by Dr. Reza Sharif-Naeini in Cell on the role of
Polycystin in pressure sensing.

different philosophical doctrines and world

religions, and at the same time did a great job
covering the sciences and mathematics. Aside from
school, my favorite pastime was to loiter around
Meydan Ferdowsi in
search of electronic
parts for the little
Scientists form a privileged
(fairly useless)
group since we typically get
gadgets I loved to
to do what we love. Every day
build.
I wonder why the university
pays me to pursue my hobbies
but dont tell my Chair, I do
need to settle my bills!

In 1984 I left Iran

for the UK to finish
the last two years of
high school. My
family stayed
behind, and I
attended a boarding
school in Dorset
(south of England) named Bryanston. There I took
four A-levels: Math, Physics, Chemistry and
Further (Advanced) Math. I enjoyed my time at
Bryanston, and spent the vacations cycling,
camping, and staying at Youth Hostels around the
UK and Europe. It was a great way of getting to
know new people and quickly absorbing the
Western culture. Those were intense times.

Kamran Khoadakhah; Cell

physiology from single channels to
behaving animals

In search of science, I pursued an undergraduate

course in Pharmacology at Kings College. I was
initially mesmerized by our seemingly supernatural
ability to alter physiologic function with drugs, but
I soon realized that pharmacology is more of a
descriptive art than science and was quickly
disenchanted with the field at large. While at Kings
College, however, I met my wife (Kimberley) who
at the time was an American student doing a junior
year abroad.

I was born in 1967, and lived together with my

parents and younger brother and sister in a happy
family in a modest apartment in Tehran. I miss
those days.
I was a good student and read a great deal. I
literally read everything and anything with subjects
ranging from contemporary novels to classics and
philosophy. Like Reza Shadmehr, whose biography
was featured in the last issue, I too attended Alborz
High school, although soon after the revolution we
were all instructed to find schools closer to our
homes. So, for a few years I attended a startup
school named Tazkieh, where a number of very
dedicated revolutionary university students had
gotten together with the goal of producing
religious, but highly educated, students. Although
not on the same page on the religious aspect, I did
appreciate their efforts and learnt a great deal from
them. During those years we examined, in depth,

Kim and I planned to do our graduate work in the

USA, but I fortuitously secured a highly
competitive and very lucrative scholarship from
Glaxo Research Group to do my Ph.D. in England
with David Ogden. David had just joined the
National Institute for Medical Research (a MRC
unit) in London as a senior scientist and I helped
him set up his new lab there. My project was fairly
high tech and advanced for its time, requiring
patch-clamp recordings in acutely prepared brain
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slices combined with time-resolved single cell

calcium imaging and flash photolysis of caged
compounds. I was Davids first student and he was
truly hands off. Retrospectively, while it was very
hard, I really learned a great deal from plumbing,
electronics, and optics, to how to approach science
from fundamental first principles. My perseverance
and long hours paid off and in a short three year
Ph.D. stint I was able to demonstrate, for the first
time, the calcium mobilizing potency of inositol
trisphosphate in intact cerebellar Purkinje cells.
Because MRC does not grant degrees, my graduate
work was associated with the University College
London (UCL). Ironically, despite my dislike of
pharmacology as a discipline, my Ph.D. degree too
is in Pharmacology! Mind you, given the long
history of nurturing outstanding scientists, I am
proud to be a graduate of UCLs Pharmacology
department.

setups, packed the lab, put it in a U-Haul, and

transported it 350 miles to our summer lab at MBL.
We would unpack the equipment the same day and
then have a race as to who would get the first
recording. It often took <48 hours from the time we
arrived at MBL for someone to record from a cell!
The atmosphere at MBL is truly magical. It is the
one place on earth where it is OK to be a nerd
everyone there is a nerd. Scientists of all rank, age
and race mingle continuously and chat spiritedly
about science while
enjoying the fresh
sea air. I often think
that scientists who
have been at MBL
hope that when they
die they are sent to
Woods Hole rather
than to heaven! At
least, I certainly do!
Incidentally, MBL offers a number of very high
quality summer courses. I taught in the
Neurobiology course for ten years, and highly
recommend it to anyone interested in a crash course
in the latest and greatest in neuroscience.

In 1992 Kim and I moved to Philadelphia. Kim,

after doing research towards a Ph.D. in Physiology,
had decided to follow her initial love and go to Vet
school at U Penn. Also at U Penn, I had secured a
postdoctoral position with Clay Armstrong, who in
my opinion is one of worlds best biophysicists. I
learned a great deal from Clay. He is truly amazing.
Mind you, I was taken aback when he told me that I
needed to make my own patch clamp amplifier, D/
A-A/D card, and its computer interface if I wanted
to do an experiment! Of course, all the software
(written in C++) was also home-brewed and
required a crash course in programming. It was a
blast! With Clay I mainly worked on the squid giant
axon measuring gating currents of voltage-gated
sodium channels and on cerebellar Purkinje cells on
the side. The scientific experience that I had with
Clay was truly invaluable, and although he and I
did not agree on the interpretation of some of our
data (and I ended up not putting my name on a few
papers), I owe a great deal to him for his mentoring.

In 1998 I started my first faculty position at the

department of Physiology & Biophysics at the
University of Colorado in Denver. It was there that
I started to mature as a scientist. Writing grants
meant thinking of the bigger picture, and I slowly
started to appreciate
my strengths and
weaknesses as a
scientist. I realized
that I was more
interested in function
and physiology, as to
how things worked at
the molecular level to
enable behavior, than
in pure biophysics. I
think this realization
has slowly morphed
my lab to what it is
now. My interests

One of the most wonderful aspects of working in

Clays lab was our summer relocation to the Marine
Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA.
Every summer we literally dismantled all of our
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mainly revolve around understanding the role of the

cerebellum in motor coordination with recent
forays into the basal ganglia. In my lab at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine (where I have been
since 2001) we go from single channel recordings
in isolated membrane patches to slice opto- and
electro-physiology and in vivo recordings in awake
behaving animals. I have also come to believe that
one of the best ways of confirming ones
hypotheses regarding function and circuit
computation is examination of related disorders. If
you can make an ataxic mouse walk by correcting
what you think is wrong on the basis of your
cellular studies, then it is likely that your initial
hypothesis is on the right track!

involvement in
physiopathology.
It is noteworthy
that Reza was
awarded the
G r u b e r
International
Neuroscience
prize for young
scientists at the 2008 annual meeting of SfN. Below
he describes a study that he performed in Honore
lab as part of his postdoctoral research. The paper
was published as an article in Cell in October
2009 (Cell. 2009 Oct 30;139(3):587-96).

Scientists form a privileged group since we

typically get to do what we love. Every day I
wonder why the university pays me to pursue my
hobbies but dont tell my Chair, I do need to settle
my bills!

Mechanotransduction is of central importance to

several physiological functions including the sense
of touch, hearing, osmoregulation and baroreceptor
function. Yet, the molecular mechanisms involved
in cellular mechanosensitivity remain poorly
understood. It was recently suggested that
polycystin-1 (PC1) and -2 (PC2), which are both
mutated in the autosomal dominant polycystic
kidney disease, form a mechanosensory complex in
the primary cilum of renal epithelial cells and are
associatedwith flow sensing. However, the way that
polycystins contribute to cellular
mechanosensitivity remains obscure. In this study,
we show that PC2 inhibits pressure sensing (i.e. the
activity of stretch-activated ion channels, SACs).
This specific effect can be abolished by coexpression with PC1, indicating that the ratio, or
dosage, of PC1 and PC2 regulates cellular
mechanosensitivity. The physiological implication
of these findings is demonstrated by Pkd1
inactivation in vascular smooth muscle cells,
provoking an impairment of arterial pressure
sensing. Moreover, we identified the actin crosslinking protein filamin A (FLNa) as a novel PC2
partner which is critical for SACinhibition.We have
discovered a molecular mechanism explaining how
polycystins regulate pressure sensing and propose a
functional model whereby the interaction between
PC2 and FLNa leads to a reduced membrane
tension provoking SAC inhibition.

Paper summary

R e z a S h a ri f - N a e i n i ; R o l e o f
Polycystin in pressure sensing
Dr. Reza Sharif-Naeini was born in Isfahan, Iran.
He left Iran at the age of 5 for Paris and moved to
Canada at 11. He received his Bachelor's degree
from the University of Montreal in Biochemistry.
His graduate work started at McGill in Montreal,
where he obtained his M.Sc. in Psychiatry and
studied spinal cord pain mechanisms. He then
obtained his PhD in physiology in 2007 in the
group of Dr. Charles W. Bourque, working on
mechanosensitive ion channels and hypothalamic
mechanisms of osmosensation. His first
postdoctoral training was in France with Dr. Eric
Honore, where he studied molecular mechanisms of
mechanosensitive channel gating. In 2010, Dr.
Sharif-Naeini joined the group of Professor Allan
Basbaum in the Department of Anatomy at the
University of California San Francisco, where he
e x a m i n e s t h e g e n e t i c , m o l e c u l a r, a n d
neuroanatomical basis of pain transmission. His
main fields of interest are the biophysical properties
of mechanosensitive ion channels and their
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Tre a s u re r s R e p o r t ; 2 0 0 9
financial year
Kiaei)

IRNSCs organizing committee is planning to have

a social event in the Marriott Hotel and dinner at a
local Persian restaurant in San Diego (details will
be announced in October). This year, expenses are
estimated to be around $1500.00. Carrying over our
shortcoming from last year, we need to raise at least
$2630.00. To raise funds to cover IRNSC eventrelated expenses, the organizing committee plans to
collect membership fees from IRNSCs members.

(by Dr. Mahmoud

It is a great pleasure to serve as treasurer for

IRNSC and to assist with the organizing committee
to make our events take place with success. IRNSC
has been in a growth phase since its start in 2005.
Every year we run two programs, a social event and
a dinner, usually one after the other. As one can
guess, successful execution of these programs
requires solid financial support. As the treasurer,
my role is to make sure that our financial status is
in good shape for these events to be run smoothly.

Membership fees
Our suggested membership fees are as follows:
Faculties, professionals, employed scientists and
consultants: $50.00 or more. Postdocs: $30.00 or
more. Students: $15.00 or more.

Through the year 2009, we have collected $670.00

from membership dues and donations. With our
suggested membership dues of $15-30, the
collected money counts for only about 20-25 of the
members. Besides, many faculty members paid
$100.00 each. This year we hope that more
members will make their payments to help IRNSC
continue its activities.

Currently, we have 118 members listed in the

IRNSC website and about 100 more members who
have not yet provided their information on the
website. If all registered members make their
payments, we should be able to raise about
$3500.00 per year. If we raise this much money,
then we certainly can have annual students best
poster award prizes to present to 3 of our students.
We ask everyone to pay his/her membership fee so
IRNSC can achieve its goals. The most important
and immediate help you can do for IRNSC is to
pay your dues today.

Our expenses for 2009 were around $1800.00.

IRNSC fell short by $1130.00 which was paid by
Dr. Omrani. Dr. Omrani is doing a tremendous job
by putting his valuable time into IRNSC and he
should not have to pay for this short fall. We expect
other members who like to see IRNSC thrive to
contribute more in providing enough funds for
IRNSC activities. Since we sent our last treasurers
report earlier this year by email, we only had two
members respond and pay their membership dues
via PayPal. We appreciate this and thank all those
who generously helped IRNSC by paying their
membership dues and their benevolent donations.
As treasurer of IRNSC, I would like to kindly ask
everyone to please pay their dues as soon as
possible. As always we would appreciate and
encourage members to make donations bigger than
the dues. Please remember that it is very important
that you provide us your dues and donations as
soon as possible so we can better plan and organize
this years social event.

Please expect emails from IRNSC organizers to

remind you of your membership dues and
solicitation for donations so we can keep IRNSC
growing and assure its success.
The organizers would like to add more activities to
our events, like sponsorships and student awards
which all depend on funding. If you, your parents
or relatives wish to sponsor student and postdoc
awards in your own name or as a tribute to
someone else, please contact us.

To pay your membership dues, please visit

w w w. I R N S C . n e t a n d c l i c k o n
Memberships and Dues link to make
your payment via Pay Pal.

Research Awards

summary of research. The CV should provide

information about your academic background, your
publications, honors and awards, teaching
experiences and any outreach or leadership abilities
that you have. The research summary should be
written in lay language so it is understandable to
our selection committee which comes from a wide
range of different backgrounds. Please attach a
copy of your original abstract submitted for the SfN
meeting along with its reference number. The
application materials should be sent to IRNSCs
email address at Iranianneuroscientists@gmail.com
by August 15th. The results will be announced by
October 15th to the successful applicants and the
awards will be officially announced and presented
at the IRNSC social event. Below you can find a
short eulogy to Mr. Jamal Omrani provided by Dr.
Omrani.

For the first time this year, we will present two

travel awards to two researchers presenting their
research work at the annual SfN meeting (one
graduate student and one posdcotoral fellow). The
award is named the "Jamal Omrani Excellence of
Science Travel Award" in honor and tribute to Dr.
Omranis late grandfather. Dr. Omranis father has
generously sponsored two $500 prizes for the
awards. Iranian neuroscience graduate students and
postdocs who have submitted an abstract as oral
presentations or posters at the 2010 SfN annual
meeting are eligible to apply for these awards. To
be considered for the award each member should be
in good standing for his/her membership dues
(please refer to financial report for membership
fees). Each applicant should provide a short CV
(maximum 2 pages) along with a one page

My grandfather was born in 1301 in Amol. He had only 9 years of formal

education which was the maximum offered at the time in a small city north of
Iran. He started his own business and soon was a successful business man. Yet
the success in business did not settle his passion for science and education. He
was an avid reader of Persian literature and history, and of course like any
wise grandfather, he would write poems too. You have heard some of those
from your grandfather too, I am sure. His zeal for higher education, persuaded
him that his kids should go to a bigger city to find the opportunity he did not
have a chance on. He sent all his kids to good high schools in Tehran and all of
them were eventually accepted into fine university programs. The biggest
parties he would throw was the time that one of his grand children gained
entrance into a university. You could definitely see the shine of pride and glory
in his eyes. I am sure he would be smiling somewhere close, saluting the highly achieved IRNSC member who
is awarded for the excellent research in his honor.

Changes in IRNSCs Website

will be happy if you kindly complete your

information in the members area.

IRNSCs domain name expired last year and we

were not able to register the same domain name.
Therefore, IRNSCs website has transferred to a
new domain. To access the IRNSC website, please
follow any of these links: www.IRNSC.net,
www.IRNSC.com or www.IRNSC.info. We are
looking forward to seeing you on our website and

IRNSC on Facebook
IRNSC is now on Facebook. Please add our
account Iranian Neuroscientists Irnsc for the
latest news happenings in IRNSC. Please add any
pictures you have from our socials to our facebook
page.
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IRNSC events and activities

announcements

receiving many highly qualified applications and

we know ahead of time that we will have a difficult
time choosing among all those bright applicants.
We strongly encourage all graduate students and
post docs to apply for this award and invite all
those colleagues who share this excitement with us
to let us know if they would like to help us with the
selection process. And please remember to pay your
membership dues so we can have another great
social event this year.

On behalf of the IRNSC organizing committee, I

would like to invite you all to our social events this
year in San Diego, CA. Our 5th annual social
meeting will be held on Monday, November 15th in
San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina in the
Newport Beach meeting room from 6:30 to 8:30
P.M. The social will be followed by dinner at a
local Persian restaurant offsite. You can find
information about the social on the SfN website and
the preliminary program. More details on the
socials program and the location of the dinner will
be published in the next newsletter in October
2010.

Finally, I would like to thank all members of the

organizing committee, Drs. Mahmoud Kiaei,
Masoud Shekarabi and Pouya Tahsili Fahadan, for
their compassionate and self-less contribution and
help in organizing the events, and also for their
brilliant ideas for expanding IRNSC activities.

We are eagerly looking forward to another vibrant

event and are especially excited for the new award
included in our program. We are looking forward to

IRNSC President,
Mohsen Omrani, M.D.

We are looking forward to seeing you at our social

meeting in the 40th annual meeting of the SfN in San
Diego, CA.

Please refer any questions or concerns to:

Iranian Neuroscientist
Community Webpage

Mohsen Omrani, MD
CNS, Queen's University
Phone: (613) 583-9690
E-mail: mohsen@biomed.queensu.ca

Please visit our webpage and

complete your own profile in
the members section:

Mahmoud Kiaei, PhD

Weill Medical College of Cornell University
E-mail: mak2026@med.cornell.edu

www.irnsc.net

We enthusiastically anticipate your

comments!

Masoud Shekarabi, MSc PhD

CHUM Research Center - Notre Dame Hospital
E-mail: seyed.shekarabi@mail.mcgill.ca
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