Month: November 2017

Workshop at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting

- rcalinjageman

This year was a big year for our lab at the Society for Neuroscience conference.  Leticia Perez, who has been in the lab for the past two summers, gave an amazing talk on our work on forgetting.  In addition, I (Bob) helped organize a Professional Development Workshop on doing better neuroscience.

It was a huge honor to get to lead this workshop.  I gave a presentation on sample-size planning (which is sooo vital to doing good science).  David Mellor at the Open Science Framework spoke about pre-registration.  And Richard Ball, who co-directs project Tier, spoke about reproducible data analysis.  Like the good Open Scientists we are, we used the Open Science Framework to post all our slides and resources: https://osf.io/5awp4/.  SFN also made a video, which should be posted soon.

SFN staff told us it was the best attended workshop for the meeting.  Hooray!  Hope all our attendees will go forth to spread the good word about these small tweaks that can have such a big impact on scientific quality.

Here’s what it looked like from my perspective:

An unforgettable experience talking about forgetting

- rcalinjageman

Wow! Our lab just returned from the 2017 Society for Neuroscience meeting.  It was the typical maelstrom of neuroscience–with more than 20,000 neuroscientists bustling about trying to share the latest and greatest about their research.

This turned out to be an especially great year for the Slug Lab.  Leticia Perez, who has been working in our lab for the past two summers, submitted an abstract to present the work she and others in the lab have been doing on forgetting.  We’ve been really excited about the results of this project.  It turns out the SFN organizers were excited, too–they selected Leticia’s abstract for a 10 minute talk during a mini-symposium on the mechanisms of learning and memory.

Leticia absolutely crushed it–she gave a concise, clear, and exciting presentation on what happens in the Aplysia nervous system as a long-term memory is forgotten.  She handled the questions wonderfully, and was soundly congratulated by many researchers in the learning and memory community.  Of the 20,000+ in attendance, I’m willing to be she was the only undergraduate to give a talk at this year’s meeting.  It was *such* an accomplishment.

In case that wasn’t enough, Leticia also brought along a poster presenting the research.  She gave the poster at the pre-meeting on molecular and cellular neuroscience and at the undergraduate poster session.  Yes, that means she gave 3 presentations last weekend!  Wow!  And, again, all went wonderfully.

Part of the reason Leticia was able to attend the meeting to earn all this acclaim is that she was awarded an Excel scholarship through Dominican University–this paid her registration, hotel, and airfare to make it affordable to attend the meeting.  She still had to work like crazy to collect the data, refine the presentation, and clear her class schedule to attend.  Lab alumnnus Marissa Rivota also attended–so her and Leticia also got to see the capital and the White house.

We’re so proud of Leticia, and of the many other students who have worked so hard in the lab for the past summers to make this forgetting project such a success.  There will be a paper on it coming out very soon in Learning and Memory.  It’s tremendous work to do good science–we’re so happy to have wonderful students who want to get involved and excel.

Below are photos of Leticia giving her talk, giving her poster, and celebrating with me, Irina, and Marissa.  Congrats, Leticia!

Slug Lab – Distinguished Service Awards from the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience

- rcalinjageman

At this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting, Irina and I were honored for our contributions to the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN).  Specifically, we were both given the annual Distinguished Service Award.  The honors were bestowed for our work organizing the FUN conference this past summer and for other work supporting the mission of undergraduate neuroscience education.

We’re so fortunate to be a part of FUN–it’s our favorite people all working towards a mission that is so very important.  Thanks for the great honor, and we’re looking forward to staying very involved with FUN.

Here’s a photo of Irina’s award.

 

 

The New Statistics for Neuroscience Education.

- rcalinjageman

This summer I (Bob) was asked to write a series of perspective pieces on statistical issues for the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience.

My first effort has just been published–it is a call for neuroscience education to shift away from p values, and an explanation of the basic principles of the New Statistics with an example drawn from neuroscience.

It turns out that the paper was published just before the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, which I am currently attending.  It’s been very gratifying to see the paper is already sparking some discussion.

Here’s the key figure from the paper comparing/contrasting the NHST approach with the New Statistics approach with data from a paper in Nature Neuroscience.