Tuesday, January 22, 2008

New Program in Cognitive Neuroscience - UC Irvine

A new doctoral-level program in Cognitive Neuroscience has recently been established here at UC Irvine. Although it is housed in the Department of Cognitive Sciences, it is a multidisciplinary program with participation from faculty members with primary appointments in departments ranging from Neurobiology and Behavior to Radiology. The program is approved to commence with the 2008-2009 academic year. A formal announcement with links to program details will follow. In the meantime, check out the list of participating faculty:

Alyssa Brewer - Human vision, fMRI, neurology
Lawrence Cahill - Memory, Emotion, functional imaging
Nicole Gage - Development, autism, language, MEG
Emily Grossman - Biological motion, fMRI, TMS
Gregory Hickok - Speech/language, fMRI, neuropsychology
Donald Hoffman - Visual perception, EEG, fMRI
Mary-Louise Kean - Language processing, fMRI, neuropsychology
Leonard Kitzes - Mammalian auditory system
Jeffery Krichmar - Memory, vision, Computational neuroscience
David Lyon - Primate visual system
James McGaugh - Neurobiology of memory
Tugan Muftuler - fMRI, cognition
Michael Rugg - Memory, fMRI, EEG
Kourosh Saberi - Hearing, fMRI
John Serences - Attention, vision, fMRI
George Sperling - Vision, memory, attention, fMRI
Ramesh Srinivasan - Consciousness, sensory systems, EEG
Norman Weinberger - Auditory cortex physiology, plasticity, learning, and memory
Fan-Gang Zeng - Hearing, clinical audiology

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

ERP Boot Camp

The ERP Boot Camp, an NIMH-funded summer workshop on the ERP
technique, will be held July 7-17 2008 at UC-Davis. Please forward
this announcement to students, postdocs, and faculty who might be
interested in attending.

The ERP Boot Camp is an 11-day introduction to the ERP technique. It
is intended for beginning and intermediate ERP researchers, or people
who are interested in getting started in ERP research. It is designed
for both basic scientists and clinical researchers.

The topics will include:

1) Where do ERPs come from? What do they mean?

2) ERP components

3) The design and interpretation of ERP experiments

4) EEG data acquisition

5) Filtering, artifact rejection, and artifact correction

6) Measuring and analyzing ERP components

7) ERP localization

8) Setting up and running an ERP lab

The Boot Camp consists of lectures on these topics, accompanied by
discussions of classic and contemporary ERP papers and guided lab
activities. It is led by Steve Luck, and the faculty includes many
distinguished ERP researchers from UC Davis and other universities.

Participants at previous Boot Camps have come from around the world
and have ranged from beginning graduate students to full professors.
They have included psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists,
neurologists, and speech pathologists. However, predoctoral students
should not apply unless they will have had at least 6 months of
intensive ERP experience before attending the Boot Camp.

We highly encourage the participation of individuals from
underrepresented groups.

Funding is available from NIMH to defray some or all of the costs of
attending the Boot Camp, but is limited to U.S. citizens and
permanent residents. International participants are encouraged to
apply, but they must obtain their own funding.

For more information about the Boot Camp and the application
procedures, see www.ERPinfo.org

Applications are due on March 31, 2008.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Graduate student reviews in Journal of Neuroscience

Journal of Neuroscience has a new section (at least, it's new to me) for graduate students and postdocs to write short reviews of recent papers. The format is described as being like a journal club, and as a venue for which junior scientists can "test their analytical and writing skills". Notably, the journal states that overly critical reviews of competitors, or glowing reviews of friend's work will not be considered (although the one I read was pretty glowing). And, they waive the submission fee for this format.

What a great idea. It's wonderful to see a high impact journal take a leadership role in training young scientists.