Administrative Updates & Announcements
We are pleased to welcome a new staff member to our Undergraduate Advising Office – Mary Simonsen. Mary comes to us from CLA Advising. Stop by when you can, and help us welcome Mary to the Department!
As a result of the recent University Risk Assessment, the Department has been advised to provide periodic reminders regarding the 'reporting' of suspected information security issues. Please take a moment to review the procedure, which can be found here.
The latest issue of Sentience, the journal for undergraduate research in Psychology at the U of M, is now available online. Please check out the recent research papers of some of our undergraduates, peer-reviewed by fellow undergraduates, here.
Awards and Accomplishments
Bruce Overmier, emeritus faculty, was nominated by the US National Academy of Sciences has been appointed to the joint International Council of Science (ICSU) and International Social Science Council "Transition Task Force" that will manage the merger of the two organizations.
Recent graduate Brenton Wiernik (advisee of Deniz Ones and John Campbell) received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation to research at the University of Ghent.
Graduated
Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!
Brenton Wiernik
Area: I/O
Advisors: Deniz Ones and John Campbell
Dissertation: The Nomological Network of Classic and Contemporary Career Preferences
Krista Wisner
Area: CSPR
Advisor: Angus MacDonald
Dissertation: An Investigation Into The Neural Nature Of Persecutory Ideation
Grants
Scott Sponheim is launching a multi-million dollar Connectome project entitled "Neural Disconnection and Errant Visual Perception in Psychotic Psychopathology". Co-investigators and consultants from the Psychology department are Cheryl Olman, Angus MacDonald, Steve Engel and Nate Helwig. This project will enroll 300 participants for multiple clinical visits and scanning sessions, at 3T and 7T, over the next 4 years, with the ultimate goal of using computational models of visual processing to providing better delineation of neural mechanisms involved in psychosis.
Kamil Ugurbil and Cheryl Olman have received a multiple-PI BRAIN Initiative R01 entitled "Neurons, vessels, and Voxels: multi-modal imaging of layer specific signals". This project is a collaboration with Prakash Kara and Thomas Naselaris at the Medical University of South Carolina that will use 2-photon microscopy in cats to measure stimulated neural activity and vessel dilation in primary visual cortex and then use computational models to link the 2-photon data to fMRI data acquired in cats (at 9.4T and 16.4T) and humans (at 7T and 10.5T).