Brain Star Award

From September 2001 to August 2005, I gained a bachelor's degree in Science by completing the neuroscience undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. I began pursuing my interest in psychological research in my third year by working in a lab focused on the mechanics of visual attention. In this lab, I built upon and applied my previous knowledge of experimental design, data analysis, and manuscript preparation. I continued my work in this lab throughout fourth year and left with a first authored paper in Cognitive Brain Research. Throughout the later two years of my undergraduate degree, I was also involved in two unrelated summer research projects. The first involved working at Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto where I conducted immunohistochemistry research on certain proteins related to cancer, and the second research project involved traveling to Southeast Asia (Cambodia) to conduct health research in a developing country.

In September of 006, I began my Masters project in the cognitive neuroscience of memory under the supervision of Dr. Stefan Köhler, and I am now continuing in his laboratory as I begin my PhD. Throughout my work in this laboratory thus far, I have trained myself in various ways to examine behavioral measures of memory, including signal detection theory and associative recognition. I have greatly enhanced my knowledge of data organization, data analysis and programming in MATLAB. I have developed skills in brain volumetry, which involves analyzing the structure and size of specific brain structures from brain imaging data. Perhaps the most significant skill I have improved upon in my Master's degree is the ability to more effectively frame scientific questions and follow up on them in a systematic manner. These skills were all critical to my publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).