The J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering is proud to announce that David Johnson, Ph.D. student in the department, has been awarded the prestigious McKnight Dissertation Fellowship from the Florida Education Fund.

The McKnight Doctoral Fellowship program aims to address the underrepresentation of African American and Hispanic faculty in Florida’s colleges and universities by increasing the pool of citizens with Ph.D. degrees qualified to teach at the higher education level. Additionally, the program seeks to broaden employment opportunities for its fellows in various industries.

David Johnson is a member of the Brain Mapping Laboratory, where he works under the mentorship of Dr. Aysegul Gunduz. His research focuses on understanding how drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) affects semantic memory, the long-term memory responsible for general knowledge. Johnson’s work also examines how brain surgery for epilepsy alters this cognitive system’s function.

The research conducted in the Brain Mapping Laboratory utilizes both invasive and noninvasive electrophysiology to study the brain. While epilepsy patients are monitored in the hospital using stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG), Johnson and his team assess how epilepsy impacts memory through cognitive tasks. In addition, they employ noninvasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) before and after surgery to observe how the brain reorganizes itself after the removal of specific brain areas.

This work is critical for understanding the impact of neurological disorders on cognitive systems. By studying the effects of brain surgery, Johnson’s research aims to provide valuable insights that could lead to improvements in postsurgical care for epilepsy patients.