Hello from the ATL!

Hey everyone! I'm a rising sophomore spending the summer in Atlanta conducting neuroscience research. I've been here for nearly 4 weeks now, so here's a summary of the program itself, and what I've been up to:

The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience has a program for undergrads called Behavioral Research Advancements in Neuroscience (which cleverly shortens to BRAIN), which I found through a Google search of "neuroscience summer program" or something of the sort back in January.

There are 36 of us, ranging from rising sophomores like me to recent graduates, and we're all staying in Emory University's dorms. During the day, though, we're in various labs in Atlanta area--a lot of people are at Emory or Georgia State; I'm the only one at Georgia Tech this year. We're also serving as subjects in an educational "experiment" to see if there's another (possibly better) way of getting undergrads involved in research, so we were randomly split into LeftBRAIN and RightBRAIN groups. I'm in RightBRAIN, so I'm going the traditional route, joining an established lab's on-going project, and I'll do a research report and presentation at the end of the summer. LeftBRAIN people are all together during the day, learning different research techniques and by the end of the program, they'll have a research proposal for a new experiment.

I arrived on May 26th and had a quick intro meeting and campus tour the day after. We also had entry interviews or focus group discussions to help the researchers understand our perspectives on science in general. We had the first weekend off in observance of Memorial Day, so a group of us decided to go explore the city. Then on Tuesday, we began orientation, a "crash course in neuroscience" to give everyone, especially those of us who don't have much of a neuroscience background, a foundation to begin our research work.

I began working in my lab the following Monday. My lab is more on the psychology/cognition end of the neuroscience spectrum, looking at memory in older and younger adults. In particular, I'm working with Eric, a postdoc, on a new study in young adults. We're using fMRI to see which parts of their brains are activated when they try to recognize words they've seen before. Two weeks in, I've finished the programming for the pilot experiment, and I'm also preparing to test older adults in a pilot for another study.

Check back for more updates as the summer progresses!

-From Hotlanta,


Jessica