This award will provide funds to Stony Brook University (SBU), New York, to purchase a Siemens MAGNETOM Trio 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. This piece of equipment will become the state-of-the-art centerpiece of a Provostial SCAN (Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience) Center at SBU. The scientific focus of the SCAN Center is on the neural bases of social, cognitive, and affective human behavior. Until recently, psychological models were based solely on behavioral data in the absence of neural data to constrain these models. Now, with the advent of non-invasive neuroimaging methods, it has become feasible to explore the neural correlates of complex human behavior, leading to an explosion of articles and two SCAN-related journal launches in 2006 alone. The scanner will support research and education in the context of projects centered on three themes: (1) interpersonal social relations, (2) cognitive processes, (3) emotional processes. In addition, the proposed scanner will support (4) relevant technology development.
The SCAN Center will integrate research and education by promoting teaching, training, and learning through MRI-related courses, seminars, hands-on training and experimentation, and mentored instruction in experimental design and analysis. The Center will promote diversity by broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in research and teaching. For example, some participating departments (Psychology, Biomedical Engineering) have graduate populations of 50% female and 10% minorities. SBU's undergraduate population is even more diverse: 50% female; 10% African American, 22% Asian American or Pacific Islander, 9% Hispanic American. Highly successful undergraduate programs include WISE (Women in Science and Engineering), a program initially funded by NSF that provides support to female students interested in scientific careers, and MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers), an NIH-funded fellowship program for minorities to work in laboratories. The proposed equipment would substantially enhance the infrastructure for research and education for SBU and BNL faculty and students. SBU and BNL are fortunate to already have a strong cadre of researchers with interests in the SCAN area, with a total of more than 200 peer-reviewed neuroimaging publications among them, but these researchers currently have no local access to a research-dedicated, modern human neuroimaging facility. The Center will bring these researchers together to produce exciting collaborations and enable SBU to attract other outstanding SCAN scientists in the future. There will also be broader impact on SBU's technology-development opportunities: SBU has well-recognized strengths in biomedical engineering, physics, computer science and other disciplines that will contribute to the impact of the center. The Center in turn will stimulate exciting interactions among these disciplines and with the SCAN researchers. With time, SBU's Research and Development Park adjacent to the main campus will provide even more exciting opportunities for scientific collaboration and for technology development. Thus, the establishment of the SCAN Center for will provide significant immediate benefits for a diverse group of investigators and for the University's research enterprise. Finally, there will be broader impact on Long Island's community: through publications, public lectures, and SBU's press office, results from the SCAN Center will be widely distributed to the public. The SCAN Center will also feature displays of the brain and ongoing research projects, and be open for tours by local K-12 schools and other groups interested in learning about neuroscience.
