LeafLabs Enables Satellite Launch

Working with the Space Development Agency, Scientific Systems Company Inc., and others, company rapidly delivers software for YAM-3 satellite mission to gather critical data and intelligence.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 14, 2021 – LeafLabs, an engineering consulting firm focused on solving the world’s most complex problems, today announced the culmination of a year-long project to build software for YAM-3 and the Prototype On-orbit Experimental Testbed (POET) payload, the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) satellite mission that launched into space on June 30, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla.

Managing Entropy in Autonomous Logistics — It’s Software-First for Pickle Robot

It’s a busy time for logistics. E-commerce is booming, and warehouses can’t keep up with the demand. The challenges are daunting — tasks are labor-intensive, the pace is frantic, and staffing shortages are perennial. While the industry is overdue for smarter solutions, robot startup investments require careful evaluation. Should robots be fully autonomous or collaborate with humans? How many tasks — and what kind of tasks — should a robot handle? Which automated solution will provide the most productivity, while still being safe and easy to operate? What are the company’s unique economics and customer’s return on investment? Will the solution scale?

We were impressed with the answers to all these questions while evaluating our recent investment in Pickle Robot and its logistics robot, Dill. Toyota AI Ventures is joining Pickle’s $5.57M seed round alongside lead investor Hyperplane and others, including Box Group, Third Kind Venture Capital, and Version One Ventures. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Pickle was founded in 2018 as a spin-out of LeafLabs by AJ Meyer (CEO), Ariana Eisenstein (CTO), and Dan Paluska (VP of Robotics).

LeafLabs Announces Expansion to New Headquarters

Company uses government Payroll Protection Plan to grow the business amid Covid-19 challenges

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 23, 2021 – LeafLabs, an engineering consulting firm, today announced it will relocate its corporate headquarters to 1280 Cambridge St., Cambridge. Mass. The 17,800 square foot building, with a storied history that includes a time as an auto body shop, has been completely renovated to meet the needs of LeafLabs’ growing employee base and project roster. At a time when the majority of workers, including Leaflabs’ employees, are remote and the global workforce is feeling more isolated than ever, the company decided to invest in an eclectic space that will physically bring people together once it is safe to do so.

LeafLabs Attending SfN 2019

LeafLabs Neuro team will be attending the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois (October 19th-23rd).

We will be circulating around the Exhibits & Posters, Sunday October 19th through Wednesday October 23rd. Please reach out to us if you would like to hear more about our Neuro-Tech and/or Open Positions at LeafLabs. In attendance this year: Sam Buercklin, and Charles Freeman.

UMN, MIT, Duke & LeafLabs Awarded RF1 Grant

Opto-Crown: Transparent skulls with embedded optics for cortex-wide cellular resolution imaging in freely moving mice.

LeafLabs is excited to announce its first award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders And Stroke, of the National Institutes of Health (1RF1NS113287-01). The total award is for $1,994,17 over three years. This comes with added excitement, as it was the NINDS (Bethesda, Maryland) that provided our Director of Neuroscience with his early career training as a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow from the UK in 2010.

Suhasa B Kodandaramaiah is the prime awardee (UMN); and is supported by teams at MIT (led by Edward Boyden, co-PI), Duke University (led by Roarke Horstmeyer) and LeafLabs (led by John L. Sherwood, co-PI).

Upcoming Talk: Harvard Brain Initiative

Event Date: November 28th, 2018

LeafLabs Director of Neuroscience, John L. Sherwood, and Harvard Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics, Adam E. Cohen, will be participating in an upcoming Harvard Brain Initiative event organized by the Cellular Modeling of Neurological Disease affinity group. The focus of the event will be ‘Neuronal activity/excitability and its relevance in neurological disease’.

This event has been coordinated by Bruna Paulsen, PhD (Postdoc, Arlotta Lab) and Nivanthika Wimalasena (Graduate Student, Woolf Lab).

LeafLabs Attending SfN 2018

LeafLabs Neuro team will be attending the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, CA.

We will be circulating around the Exhibits & Posters from Sunday, November 4th through Wednesday, November 7th. Please reach out to us if you would like to hear more about our Neuro-Tech and/or Open Positions at LeafLabs. In attendance this year: John Sherwood (LeafLabs, Director of Neuroscience), Mark Spatz (LeafLabs, Member of Technical Staff), and Fisher Jepsen (LeafLabs).

Ground Truth Data for High Density Silicon Probe Recordings

One way that neurons communicate is via all or nothing physiological events called action potentials. Interestingly, action potentials can be readily and reliably recorded from outside of the neuron by electrodes placed within 100 μm of a neurons cell body. These extracellularly recorded action potentials are fast, typically lasting on the order of just a few ms. It is this fast time-course, and their sharp shape, that has led extracellularly recorded action potentials to be commonly referred to as ‘spikes’.

LeafLabs Awarded NIMH/NIH Phase I STTR Grant

Toward Automated Spike Sorting via Ground Truth Neural Recordings

LeafLabs is excited to announce that the National Institute of Mental Health has awarded us a Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer grant (1R41MH116752-01), amounting to $438k over 12 months. The proposed research will use multi-modal recordings of neuronal activity to generate a corpus of ground truth data for the validation of spike sorting algorithms. This grant will fund a collaboration between LeafLabs and Ed Boyden at MIT.

LeafLabs Awarded NIH Phase II SBIR Grant to Make 1000-Channel Neural Recordings Routine

LeafLabs would like to announce that the National Institute of Mental Health has awarded us a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant under Award Number R44MH114783. The award provides the first year of funding for a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant that amounts to $1.99M of funding over three years. The grant will fund a collaboration between LeafLabs, Ken Shepard at Columbia University, and Ed Boyden at MIT to build a 1000-channel silicon probe, for freely-moving neural recording, and implement hardware and software solutions for scalable data analysis.

Lotus and Image Reconstruction Efficiency

Lotus is a LeafLabs project that uses a light-field microscope to capture high-resolution 3D images of neuron activity in zebrafish brains. Before a 3D image can be reconstructed from the raw images taken by the microscope, three processing steps must happen. First, a matrix known as the point spread function must be calculated using physical parameters from the experiment. Second, the raw images must be cropped and aligned. Finally, a 3D image can be reconstructed by using the point spread function to perform a 3D deconvolution.

LeafLabs Grant Collaborations

Recently LeafLabs hosted a pizza party/ grant writing jam session at the Mcgovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. The purpose of the event was to have our engineers and scientists to talk about SBIRs, STTRs, and the collaborative grant writing process with PI’s, researchers, and graduate students.

CMV12000 Bring-Up: Trials and Tribulations

Lotus is a LeafLabs project supported by a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health, under Award Number R43MH109332, with the goal of using light-field microscopy to visualize neural activity in the zebrafish brain at single neuron resolution. In order to perform high-speed volumetric calcium imaging, used to visualize neural activity, we have proposed a microscope design with a frame rate of 300FPS and resolution of 4096 by 3072 pixels, to capture the entire neonatal zebrafish brain.

Team Cooking Extravaganza pt. II

We made our triumphant return to Shiso Kitchen, for another great cooking class, for our most recent team activity! On the menu, we had eggplant, potato, tomato, and white bean plaki, Mediterranean couscous, shrimp and mushroom skewers, and cinnamon sugar phyllo cups filled with mixed berries. Needless to say, it was delicious. Not only that but we all had a lot of fun together. Team activity success!

Silicon Probes Record Neural Activity From Brain Organoid

Of all the organs in the human body, perhaps the most difficult to study is the brain, owing to its dazzling complexity and its isolation from the rest of the body afforded by the protective skull and blood-brain barrier. So imagine if a miniature copy of a brain could be grown in a dish from stem cells in the body. With such a technology, the possibilities seem endless for understanding brain diseases and for developing therapeutics quickly.