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Black Lives Matter

As a white academic, I am aiming to take some time every day to consider what I can do to be anti-racist.

I like reading, and I highly recommend how to be anti-racist (read in 2021) as a place to start. It navigates the complexity of dealing with real human beings while laying out a path for becoming a person who organizes to promote anti-racist policies.

If you prefer articles or movies there are many listed in this google doc.

Personal Pledge

For 2021, I am:

• continuing to read and learn
• working with an educator at a lower SES school in the northeast to design a neuroscience course aimed at getting URM high school students more excited and on a path toward STEM.
• aiming to recruit BIPOC students for paid undergraduate research positions in our lab
• donating my money and time to protests, bail-funds, and organizations that support the BLM movement
• prepared to actively respond to racist comments or actions in the workplace and in my life and looking for spaces in which to practice those skills
• checking in once a year to compare what I did with my goals and set new goals

If you have any thoughts, don't hesitate to contact me.

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As a graduate student working with Justin Gardner one of my major projects has been to look at how we can use motion visibility to understand how the brain "reads out" from sensory representations during perceptual decision making.

The first paper focuses on how changes in sensory representation are insufficient to explain changes in human behavior during a "feature-based attention" task.

The second paper is a framework for modeling how visual cortex responds to motion visibility.

with Justin Gardner at Gardner Lab; Code; Stim; Data

A flexible readout mechanism of human sensory representations

Birman, D., & Gardner, J. L. (2019). A flexible readout mechanism of human sensory representations. Nature Communications.

Link to paper:

A quantitative framework for motion visibility in human cortex

Birman, D., & Gardner, J. L. (2018). A quantitative framework for motion visibility in human cortex. Journal of neurophysiology.

Link to paper:

Full dissertation

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The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements

In 2013 I lived in Berlin and worked in the lab of John-Dylan Haynes on this project.

We have an intuition that we "commit" to a decision at a specific moment. Despite this intuition early neuroscience researchers found that brain activity becomes predictive of our intentions far in advance, sometimes up to 10 seconds. In this experiment we showed that in reality the point of no return, after which an action is guaranteed to happen, occurs only about 200 ms before motor activity. Until the point of no return the brain has not committed with no possibility of cancelling.

Birman, D.*, Schultze-Kraft, M.*, Rusconi, M., Allefeld, C., Görgen, K., Dähne, S., ... & Haynes, J. D. (2015). The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201513569. *Equal author contribution. at hayneslab

Link to paper:

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I am very interested in the idea of building better models to link human and non-human animal behavior as a way of better connecting physiological data from different model systems. We got interested in this project while looking at a set of monkey physiology data where the order of task training turned out to be critical to interpreting the results.

Comparing monkey and human learning

Birman, D., & Gardner, J. L. (2016). Parietal and prefrontal: categorical differences?. Nature neuroscience, 19(1), 5-7. at Gardner Lab.

Link to paper:

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Vertical Neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience tutorials

Brain

Brain is a playful learning environment I have been working on. A demo version is available:

Teaching

Cognitive Neuroscience

Vertical Neuroscience (PSYCH 149s) - Featured in Stanford news! Summer 2019

Instructors: Dan Birman, Corey Fernandez

Introduction to cognitive neuroscience (PSYCH 50) Winter 2019, Winter 2018, Winter 2017, Winter 2016

Instructor: Justin Gardner
Head TA: Dan Birman
2019 TAs: Akshay Jagadeesh, Minyoung Lee, Jon Walters, Ian Eisenberg, Josiah Leong, Kawena Hirayama; Undergraduate TAs: Megumi Sano, Graham Todd, Greg Weaver, Vinh Ton, Kendall Costello, Michael Ko
2018 TAs: Akshay Jagadeesh, Minyoung Lee, Guillaume Riesen, Jon Walters; Undergraduate TAs: Emma Master, Stephanie Zhang, Kawena Hirayama, Henry Ingram, Storm Foley
2017 TAs: Minyoung Lee, Lior Bugatus, Zeynep Enkavi, Mona Rosenke, Guillaume Riesen
2016 TAs: Anna Khazenzon, Natalia Velez, Anthony Stigliani, Rosemary Le

Cognitive neuroscience - first year seminar for neuroscience graduate students (NEPR 207) Spring 2018, Spring 2017, Spring 2016

Instructors: Russ Poldrack, Justin Gardner
TA: Dan Birman

Statistics

Methods for behavioral and social sciences (PSYCH 252) Fall 2016

Instructors: Ewart Thomas, Benoit Monin
TAs: Dan Birman, Stephanie Gagnon, Robert Hawkins

Rock Climbing

Vertical rescue Winter 2019, Spring 2018, Winter 2018, Spring 2012, Spring 2011

Belaying from above and rappelling clinic Winter 2019, Fall 2018

Sport leading clinic Winter 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Winter 2018

Crack climbing clinic Fall 2017

Winter camping Spring 2012, 2011, 2010

Multipitch climbing: Red Rock Spring 2012

Multipitch climbing: Shawangunks Fall 2011