This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program. This project will provide undergraduate students training in methods to measure brain activity in humans. Measurements of brain activity are key to a number of efforts that serve the national interest, including diagnosing and treating a wide variety of diseases, enhancing effectiveness of intelligence and military personnel, and developing improved educational and training methods for both children and adults. The project will give intensive training to a diverse group of undergraduate students over the course of a 10 week summer program. The training will allow these students to fill critical needs in ongoing projects, both within and outside academia, and to eventually develop their own projects advancing the national interest. The program will begin with a 2-week full day boot camp to cover basics of the methods to measure brain activity (such as magnetic resonance imaging, MRI), which will be followed by an 8 week placement in a cutting edge research lab. Frequent seminars will provide students with the additional professional skills they need to succeed in their future careers.
Neuroimaging is the most commonly used laboratory tool in in Cognitive Neuroscience, helping to unify the field and drive research progress. Undergraduate training in neuroimaging, however, has lagged because of its high cost and relatively technical nature. This in turn has made it difficult for researchers to identify and recruit students into their Cognitive Neuroscience laboratories that use neuroimaging, while also placing a large training burden upon them. The goal of the proposed program is to overcome the training gap in neuroimaging for cognitive neuroscience. Over the course of a 10-week summer program undergraduate students will gain both detailed knowledge of neuroimaging methods and intensive experience using them in a research project. A 2-week imaging boot camp will give trainees facility with fMRI and EEG imaging modalities. Students will then conduct individual 8-week imaging-based research projects within top Cognitive Neuroscience labs. Twice weekly seminars will cover topics such as research ethics, scientific writing, crafting graduate school applications, and how to navigate laboratory structure, as well as the content of the field. Additional group activities will form a bonded cohort of trainees with common interests in neuroimaging. The research projects in which trainees will participate will collectively drive the field forward, rigorously testing key hypotheses with state-of-the-art methods. The participating laboratories have well-documented track records of such research. The labs span three subdomains in the field, perception, cognition, and clinical applications, and examples of topics under investigation range from techniques to enhance memory and creativity, to factors that underlie drug addiction in teenagers, to interventions to aid speech comprehension in people with hearing loss.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
