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MozillaFoundation / mozfest-program-2016

Mozilla Festival proposals for 2016
https://mozillafestival.org
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Become a neuroscientist #618

Closed mozfest-bot closed 8 years ago

mozfest-bot commented 8 years ago

[ ID ] abe40196-eb8f-4678-a8cd-1a2293cf5ad7

[ Submitter's Name ] Kate Mills

[ Submitter's Twitter ] @le_feufollet

[ Space ] science [ Secondary Space ] youth

[ Format ] learning-lab, hands-on

Description

I will facilitate a session where participants learn how to conduct neuroscience research on human brain imaging data. This session will teach participants how to:

  1. Access openly available neuroimaging datasets on the web.
  2. Access openly available analytic tools on the web.
  3. Formulate questions about the brain.
  4. Design an analysis that can potentially answer these questions.
  5. Make sense of the results!

While the key to this workshop is providing the participants with the tools to do this kind of research on their own laptop, I will discuss theories in human neuroimaging and neuroscience to help participants formulate questions, design analysis strategies, and interpret results.

Agenda

To save time, I would first prepare all the resources to be analysis-ready. However, the participants will be shown how to access each resource essential in the process. All data would be prepared to be analysis-ready through R, and participants would need some familiarity with coding. The datasets are available in several locations on the web, including INDI (http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/summerofsharing2012.html). The tools we would use include open source neuroimaging processing and visualization software like AFNI and FreeSurfer. Several researchers have made their processing and analysis scripts openly available. We would focus on how to adapt and apply some of these analysis scripts to new datasets to answer questions proposed by participants. Ultimately, I see this "working" by inspiring the participants to conduct neuroscience research by giving them the tools (both theoretical and practical) to ask questions about the brain.

Participants

I could easily do this with 3 participants by making this more focused on their specific questions. For 15 and 25 participants, we could focus on going through some ready-to-go questions or one or two participant-led questions. If there is enough interest, we would break into small groups, each focused on answering one participant-generated question. I have conducted a workshop with a dozen teenagers focused on developing questions about the adolescent brain and interpreting past research.

Outcome

I hope to keep track of the participant projects through an open science framework (https://osf.io) project page, and keep participants abreast of new opportunities such as hackathons (e.g. http://brainhack.org/). Even if the participants decide not to utilize the resources covered in the session, I hope they will bring forward the motivation to think about brain research and how they can be the "leading" scientist in the process by asking the questions and figuring out how to answer those questions. If enough young people are involved, I would like to focus on how they might think about questions involving the developing brain.

arlissc commented 8 years ago

Unfortunately, this session has been closed as the facilitator was unable to attend without a stipend. We hope to see Kate at next year's festival.