Seeing Change

Summer Sheremata, Ph.D., refines mapping tools of healthy brains in an effort to help identify where systems can go awry in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other psychiatric and neurological disorders.

“We need to grab sensory information from the external world, but also maintain the memory and meaning of that information,” said Sheremata, assistant professor in the department of psychology and the FAU Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

“The visual cortex gives a real-time display of what’s happening in the visual world. And, ideally that area is not known to have memory. Other areas of the brain, [that perform] cognitive processes, hold information over long durations of time. The parietal cortex located within the cerebral cortex is the area that pieces visuals and the stored information all together,” she says.

“A bird flying across our visual field might disappear behind an object for a few seconds,” she said. “Yet, our visual and attention systems are very good at taking that representation and fitting it together and giving us an understanding of what is happening. We don’t see two birds in two separate areas but a single bird moving continuously across the visual field. We know that this capability breaks down in people with certain disorders and sometimes in aging as well.”

Enhanced mapping tools can allow researchers to identify where this loss of cognitive capability occurs in the brain, potentially aiding early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s and other disorders and more effective treatments.

Sheremata’s laboratory is collaborating with the 1Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Consortium to map working memory, and attention deficits and specific brain areas associated with the disease. “If we can figure this out, then we will know the specific networks and the specific cognitive functions that are first impaired in Alzheimer’s,” she said.

As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, she accidentally enrolled in a class about the brain basis of schizophrenia. “I became fascinated by it,” Sheremata said. “The disease is very complex, and the tools used to study it were very complex. I soon realized that schizophrenia was the tip of the iceberg of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. I decided that I would do basic research to eventually help these individuals—and that’s been the driving factor of my research.”

She has two degrees in psychology, a bachelor’s from Northwestern University and a doctorate from Boston University. In 2015, after postdoctoral fellowships at George Washington University and the University of California Berkeley, she arrived at FAU.

“FAU has extraordinary individuals working in the department of psychology and the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences,” she said. “I’m a Florida girl, having grown up in Miami. I was impressed that this amazing university was investing in neuroscience research, and right in my backyard. The more I learned about Florida Atlantic University, the more excited I became about joining the research faculty here.”