October 2011
Ishani Banerji
Note: GPSO and UGS did not give out Grad Student of the Month awards for much of fall 2011 and some of spring 2012 because they were in the process of redesigning the nomination and awarding process.
Ishani Banerji, October 2011 Grad Student of the Month
IU graduate student Ishani Banerji is enamored with the academic lifestyle.
"To me it seems like the perfect life, which probably makes me a huge nerd," Banerji said. "But my favorite part of America is academic campuses. I feel the most at home on academic campuses; they're familiar to me, comfortable. I know what is expected of me, I know the culture and I love that to some extent everyone here is engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. I just love it."
“[For my undergraduate degree,] I went to this tiny liberal arts college called Denison University [in Granville, Ohio] where you simply have to form relationships with the people on campus. The faculty was so supportive, they were always there for me and became like a second family. For me, I really loved that idea of having that relationship and being embedded in this network of people who all really, really care about education.”
“At Denison, I was able to do a lot of research as an undergraduate because there aren’t any grad students. So I knew I loved doing research and [when I was working on my master’s degree] at Wake Forest I got to do a lot more research, particularly cross-cultural research, which I had become interested in my senior year of college.” she said.
At the big social psychology conference in January the year Banerji was looking for a doctoral program to join, she met a lot of graduate students from the places she would be interviewing with later that semester.
“As I was applying to Ph.D. programs, IU wasn’t my top choice. I thought who wants to be in the Midwest surrounded by cornfields? Then at this conference, I met a lot of students who barely gave me the time of day. But the IU students—I mean, the entire department—came to my poster presentation. They were all there and making that effort to make me feel welcome and I hadn’t even decided where I was going to go yet.”
It was at this same conference where she first met her current advisor Dr. Eliot Smith.
“Until that point, I felt that there were two kinds of faculty; the super-brilliant, super-productive, big names in their fields, but kind of [arrogant], and the faculty who are understanding and friendly, but haven’t done as much with their careers. The faculty I had met who were well-known in the field were just not people who I could look up to socially and personally. Dr. Smith is brilliant, but is totally un-egotistical about it,” she said.
“That brought me to IU.”
“I struggled a lot [with the decision] because I had other highly-ranked options, but because of my experience at Denison, that kind of colored it. I knew I wanted a place where I would be comfortable because you don’t want to be in a Ph.D. program that is highly ranked, but then hate yourself every day for three or four or five or six or however many years you’re going to be there [because you don’t feel like you belong]. It’s not worth it.”
Banerji is currently at the start of her fourth year. She took her qualifying exams last year.
“The social psychology program within the psychology department is the only one that has exams, like actual exams, whereas all the other programs do papers. It’s a two-day exam with three or four questions to answer each day, and about four hours a day to do so. It’s a summer of reading as much as you can and memorizing as much as you can because you can’t bring anything into the room when you take the exam,” she said.
“All the more senior students will tell you that the faculty aren’t interested in setting you up to fail—they want you to succeed, you’re going to be fine. So look at it as an opportunity to read a lot, and learn a lot and really get embedded in the literature; that all sounds fine, but before you take the exam it’s still really, really scary. But now, post-exam, that’s exactly what I’m telling the students who are taking it this year.”
At IU, Banerji’s research has taken a lot of different lines. She studies group emotions, an interest she picked up from working with her advisor, but Banerji gives it a cross-cultural twist.
“[Group emotions are] the emotions you experience when you think of yourself as a member of a certain group. So the emotions you would feel as a woman, or as an American, as opposed to the emotions you feel just as yourself,” she said. “My first project, which has now become this monster of a project that has taken me three years to get done is looking at American, Chinese and Germans [participants]. I have collaborators in both of those countries—it was actually amazing how I found those collaborators because nobody in my department does cross-cultural work,” she said.
The German collaborator was a graduate student from the University of Hamburg that she met at the annual social psychology conference. The Chinese collaborator is a more round-about story.
“We had a speaker from the University of Chicago come to the department to give a talk. I met her over lunch and was talking to her about my project and how I really wanted to collect some data from Asia. She said she knew this professor who teaches in New Zealand who happened to be going to China to give some talks. She put me in touch with him and he found two students in China who were interested in collaborating with the project.”
“It’s wonderful to me that the faculty in my department are so supportive of students doing work with other people. Right now I’m collaborating with three of the four faculty members in my department, including my advisor. This year I’ll be at Santa Barbara to work with my advisor’s collaborator, Diane Mackie. Santa Barbara has a much more diverse population so some of the research I’m interested in doing—looking at some of these various racial differences, stereotypes and prejudices, I can do over there a little bit more easily than at IU,” she said.
“It feels great to know that you have multiple lines of research and that there are multiple people out there that you can turn to for feedback and advice and just work with,” Banerji said. For example, in another line of Banerji’s research, she is working with another of her advisor’s students, Dr. Charles Seger, who recently graduated and is currently teaching in the UK.
“There has been a lot of research that suggests that when you have contact with the members of an out-group, so say white people interacting with African-Americans, that your prejudice towards that out-group goes down and you have a more positive outlook. So, research in this area has come up with lots of different versions of this main idea of contact. What I became interested in is the idea of physical contact, but not with the people of the out-group, but with the products of the out-group,” she said. This resulted in Banerji teaming up with Dr. B J Rydell on a project involving turbans.
“In the first study I did, we gave people turbans and we either had them look at the turban, or look and touch the turban if they wanted to, or they got no exposure to the turban. Then we measured their prejudice towards Muslims.” They are now repeating this study with do-rags and measuring prejudice against African-Americans.
“For the turban study we found that seeing the turban had some prejudice-reducing effect, but it was touching the turban that really seemed to make a difference. We’re hoping to see the same thing with the do-rag,” she said.
“I’m also going to be doing a study with Charlie in the UK where we’re going to be giving people hummus either labeled Nigel’s Bean Dip or call it something in Arabic with Arabic writing all over it. We’ll ask the subjects to taste it and we’ll measure their attitudes towards Muslims.”
“So that is the basic idea—that a lot of the time, when you’re interacting with a different culture, it’s not with the people, it’s seeing CNN’s coverage of terrorists or going to an ethnic food restaurant,” she said. “It’s all exciting.”
August 2011
Stacey Jacobsen
Stacey Jacobsen, August's Graduate Student of the Month
Recently graduated doctoral student Stacey Jacobsen from the IU Kelley School of Business, Department of Finance, investigated the private incentives of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), showing that the market attaches a high value to CEOs who restrain from activities that increase their private benefits.
After graduating with an undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University in Ft Worth, Texas, Dr. Jacobsen worked at an investment bank where she was involved with corporate finance activities such as mergers, acquisitions and IPOs.
"The president of the investment banking division was very interested in financial research and pushed the analysts to read academic literature, which is kind of unusual for practitioners because usually only academics read academic literature," she said. "But I knew at some point in my career, to get to the next step in the corporate world, I was going to have to get an MBA or go to school in some form. By then I'd become interested in the research, so I gave in and decided to get a Ph.D. after years of swearing I wouldn't."
Dr. Jacobsen came to IU specifically to work with Dr. Utpal Bhattacharya, who became her advisor and chair of her research committee. "He believes you should ask interesting, important questions that are relevant beyond academia—issues that we care about in our everyday lives," she said. "I thought that was something neat."
"His test for an interesting research question is 'Tell your mom the idea, and if she doesn't understand it or she doesn't find it interesting then it's a bad idea. Do the same with your grandma and so on.' And because of that his research is cited often and it's always exciting," she said.
The idea for Dr. Jacobsen's dissertation came from her coursework and her corporate experience.
"[In business school,] you take these corporate finance classes and most of the research assumes that managers and CEOs are all homogenous. They're basically robots. If you give two CEOs the same compensation contract, and the same monitoring by the board of directors and shareholders, they'll always make the same decisions. Very little research has considered the idea that these CEOs have idiosyncrasies that might affect their decision making," Dr. Jacobsen said.
"So I thought back to my days in investment banking and working on corporate finance, and my experience that you came across very different personalities in CEOs. Some of these guys had huge egos, whereas others were very cautious—maybe they grew up in the Depression—and others were always thinking about ethical and moral consequences."
"I started to wonder if these idiosyncrasies mattered in terms of a corporate finance setting. Do investors care about these idiosyncratic incentives? Do they value that information? We talk in finance about things we can incentivize CEOs with, like compensation contracts, which we can monitor and control, but there are characteristics that can't be controlled that will affect how a CEO makes decisions."
Dr. Jacobsen looked at CEOs who cancel acquisition deals, or mergers, because they are too expensive. CEOs have incentives to complete these acquisitions, she said, because their pay is directly tied to the size of the firm. Each time a CEO completes a merger, s/he increases the size of the firm and thus the CEO's compensation.
"So, it tells us something very valuable about the CEO that is willing to forgo this and cancel a deal because it's bad for shareholders. [Looking at these canceled deals] allows me to disentangle one very specific idiosyncratic incentive, which I call 'restraint' or 'discipline.'" A CEO shows 'restraint' by canceling a deal, she said.
To understand if the market values this characteristic she does two tests.
First, Dr. Jacobsen looks at the capital market response, or how the stock market reacts to the announcement of the cancellation. She found a significant increase in the firm's share price in the days surrounding the cancellation announcement.
Second, she looks at the labor market perspective. Dr. Jacobsen found that CEOs who show 'restraint' have better career prospects. These CEOs are significantly less likely to be fired and more likely to move onto better jobs, meaning they are more likely to become CEOs at bigger public firms.
Bad CEOs would have done the deal even if it was expensive, Dr. Jacobsen said.
"I think it's interesting because in the last ten years everyone has been seeing these revelations of CEOs committing fraud, or going to jail or paying themselves too much. So this is a nice revelation of a CEO doing something good, something right," she said.
She begins as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University this month.
April 2011
Nicole Willock
Nicole Willock, April's Graduate Student of the Month
When Nicole Willock was 18, she didn’t know that studying Chinese would change her life. Currently a graduate student in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies at IU, Willock said her desire to research Tibetan culture began when she was studying abroad as a young adult.
“It’s a passion for me to study and I think as a grad student you have to have that passion and tenacity to keep going. An important part of where that comes from is my own personal experiences studying abroad,” said Willock.
Her adventures began when Willock traveled to China to study Chinese at Sichuan University and film at the Beijing film academy. She also visited Tibet for three months and that experience in particular motivated Willock to want to understand Tibet’s place in China and how those diverse cultures interact.
After a year and a half in China, she began a Master’s degree program with a major in Chinese literature and a minor in Tibetan language at Hamburg University in Germany. She also spent time teaching English as a second language for the university and various language companies.
“At the time, I knew I loved to teach and in particular, to teach about China, but it was hard to marry those two in Germany,” she said. “Up to that point, I was ambivalent about being a professor, but I knew I wanted to study Tibet and the best place to study Tibetan is IU; it has one of the best departments in the country. My advisor Dr. Elliot Sperling speaks Tibetan and uses both Tibetan and Chinese language source materials. He’s one of only a few people who can do that.” She also works closely with Dr. Gendun Rabsal from the IU Department of Central Eurasian Studies, who was instrumental in helping Willock select source materials and the subject of her dissertation.
The religious studies part of her doctoral work came from her deep interest in intellectual history. Willock said she likes understanding how people think, and in Tibetan society, those intellectuals tended to be religious figures. Taking classes in religious studies gave Willock the foundation she needed to approach her doctoral research.
“I love Chinese culture and Tibetan history and sometimes it’s a clash and sometimes it’s harmonious. The paradoxes have driven me to figure that out and it still does. I have friends there, both Tibetan and Chinese, and those personal connections and experiences have driven my work,” Willock said.
Willock’s work on Tibet is hagiographical, she said, meaning she studies the lives of saints. “Hagio” means saints or holy people, and “graphy” essentially means to study. Her dissertation takes a multidisciplinary approach to the life and writings of a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and monk named Tseten Zhabdrung Jigme Rigpe Lodro (1910-1985). Tseten Zhabdrung is interesting as an intellectual figure, Willock said, because he was well respected by both Tibetans and Chinese.
In 2008, Willock travelled to China and Tibet for field research on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Based at Qinghai Nationalities University (in Xining, Qinghai Province), she traveled to six monasteries where Tseten Zhabdrung had resided. She also interviewed former students from when he taught classes at secular universities, several of whom now have important intellectual positions in Tibet today as deans, research scholars, writers and editors.
This semester, Willock is revising her dissertation while teaching a course on the politics of religion in modern China at the University of Boulder in Colorado. She plans to defend this summer and graduate in August.
Fluent in German, Tibetan, Chinese, Willock has received a number of awards including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation. She has presented her research in the US, Canada and Europe and currently holds her the Department of Religious Studies’ Dissertation Fellowship. Additionally, Willock is the only graduate student participating in a five-year seminar on Tibetan literature taking place in the American Academy of Religion at the University of Virginia. The seminar focuses on how Tibetan literature is seen in the academy and in general.
FEBRUARY 2011
Josh Carney
Josh Carney, February's Graduate Student of the Month
Josh Carney’s path to graduate school in Communication and Culture at IU is as interesting as his research, and it begins with a trip to Africa.
After receiving a BA cum laude from Whitman College in Washington, Carney spent a year in Malawi on a Fulbright where he served as the principal investigator of the Phalombe Ethnobotanical Survey for the Mulanje Mountain Conversation trust. The goal of the survey was to preserve traditional plant knowledge and gauge the effects of deforestation.
While in Malawi, Carney began writing about what he saw and the process appealed to him--enough that his path next led to an MA in English at Western Washington University followed by an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. In Arizona, he wrote about his work in ethnobotany and travels in Malawi.
Carney has an interest in how other cultures work, and after completing his MFA, he traveled to Turkey to teach English for a few years. As he spent time learning Turkish and observing the culture, he became increasingly interested in Turkish media.
Carney’s path eventually led to IU where he is currently a doctoral student in Communication and Culture. His dissertation project is a media ethnography based on popular Turkish television. He hopes to spend more time in Turkey next year gathering ethnographic research on the audiences and the producers of the texts he has studied. One aspect of his work may involve interviewing the production team for one of the most popular Turkish television and film series in recent memory.
“It’s sort of a mafia crime drama, but what’s interesting is that it takes events from the daily news and within months they're part of the plot. One of the most interesting offshoots of the series, for example, was a blockbuster film that combined seven major events that happened during the Iraq war. The main plot is about a mafia infiltrator--a secret service agent--who goes into Iraq to get revenge on a commander who insulted some Turks. The insult really happened and it was a hugely important event in Turkey. So, while the main character is fictional, both his motives and much of the world that he operates in have some basis in fact.
"People are concerned about it because it seems to be melding fact and fiction in strange ways and the audiences for that series get very into it. I hope to speak with the filmmakers, but also interview and observe the audiences watching their films--see what kind of communities they are forming and how they feel about the texts,” he said.
“There are a lot of rumors about how these texts work and there are a lot of assumptions about how audiences understand them, but not much work has gone into talking to people and asking what they actually take from these texts. That is, the critique of these texts thus far has come mainly from elites who may have little contact with the people who are actually watching the shows."
In assessing these texts and their social impact, Carney works closely with his advisor, Jon Simons, who specializes in image studies and political theory, as well as with anthropologist Ilana Gershon, reception specialist Barbara Klinger, and Erdem Cipa, from Turkish Studies.
Since joining IU, Carney has been awarded two Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to study Turkish and Kurdish, as well as the Virginia Gunderson Award for the best graduate seminar paper in the Department of Communication and Culture, an American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) award for intensive Turkish language study at Bogazici University in Istanbul, and an Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) summer fellowship coupled with an IU Pre-Dissertation grant that enabled Carney to begin his field-work.
While at IU Carney has also helped to found two organizations: the salsa dance group Ritmos Latinos, now in its fourth year in Bloomington and, more recently, a group called Hoosiers for Peace in the Middle East, which is devoted to fostering education and dialog regarding conflicts in the Middle east, including the Israel/Palestine conflict and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
JANUARY 2011
Kaylah Lalonde
Kaylah Lalonde, January's Graduate Student of the Month
During her first year as an undergraduate student at Louisiana State University, Kaylah shadowed a speech therapist for a day. As they traveled from home-to-home to meet with children under three, Lalonde learned about the wide range of issues encountered by a speech therapist – from autism to hearing loss to cognitive impairment – and found it fascinating.
At first, she took classes on the clinical track for speech pathology, but the summer before her junior year, Lalonde was invited to join the McNair Scholars Program, paired with a mentor, and with that person’s help, developed a project of her own.
“I had a great mentor there who let me work hands-on. We started from scratch, developed the idea and ran all the way through with it. That’s how I got involved in research and decided it was more interesting and fun than the clinic,” she said. She continued on into the doctoral program in Speech and Hearing Sciences at IU, where Lalonde received the McNair Graduate Fellowship, a highly selective, campus-wide competition supporting graduate students for up to five years.
Lalonde is researching developmental speech perception. She studies the processes that allow us to understand speech, starting with the ear and working up to the brain, and how those processes develop. “There are different levels of speech perception, such as detection, discrimination, recognition, and comprehension,” Lalonde said. Her current research focuses on the discrimination level.
“All of these levels are important, and a breakdown at any level can be problematic for language development. If a child's hearing aid or cochlear implant settings are not sufficient to allow them to discriminate between speech sounds (such as the difference between the words ‘so’ and ‘show’), they may have difficulty forming robust phonological representations,” she said.
She has worked closely with her advisor, Professor Rachael Holt on a project designed to find better ways to test speech discrimination in toddlers. Before this study began, Professor Holt worked with speech discrimination in adults and children from the age of four, and similar work has been done with infants. The research involves adapting the procedures that have been successful with older children, to compensate for the limitations of testing 2- and 3-year-olds. Holt estimates that Lalonde has tested the sound-discrimination of more than 40 children between the ages of 2- and 3-years-old.
“The age range we work with has been ignored, because toddlers are so hard to test,” she said. “You can hold an infant in your lap and watch their reaction to a stimulus, but toddlers are hard to keep in one place. Getting toddlers to understand what you’re asking of them, and then holding their interest is a challenge. Toddlers aren’t fully intelligible—we can’t always understand what they are trying to say—so you can’t simply ask a toddler what they hear and see,” she said.
First the toddlers receive a quick hearing screening, as is done with newborns, to make sure the child has normal hearing. “Then to test speech discrimination we have them stand on a mat and listen to some speech sounds and make a judgment as to whether all the sounds are the same or whether there was a change in the sound. So maybe it will say ‘ba ba ba ba’ or maybe ‘ba ba boo boo.’ We of course put it in the context of games,” Lalonde said. “We do whatever works, really. You have to work around what the child does and adapt yourself to their manner.”
To measure whether the child can discriminate between the sounds, the child is first taught how the test will work using animal sounds, so they will understand what is being asked of them. Then, the tester moves into more abstract non-words like the sounds that will be used during the testing. Lalonde said this is so that she can test perceptual abilities, as opposed to language abilities. Each sound pair is presented 36 times.
“We then use statistics to determine whether the toddler can differentiate between sounds and how much of their choice is based on some bias, such as preferring a particular picture,” she said. “We hope to develop better methods that can eventually be used in the clinic for young children with hearing loss, to test the benefits of cochlear implants and hearing aids and determine whether the aids need to be adjusted,” she said.
With this project, Lalonde and her co-researchers found that children were variable in their performance, as is to be expected, she said, and she is now looking into factors that might be causing this by looking at behavior, language development, and working memory measures, and “we’re adapting the test a little based on what we saw with the kids,” she said, “. . . to make sure they really do understand the task and to hold their attention longer.”
For her next project, Lalonde will also use audio-visual testing to see if toddlers use visuals speech information (e.g. such as in lip reading) to compliment the auditory signal, particularly when noise disrupts the auditory signal. Other research with older children suggests that children this age don’t use signals from the face in the same manner as adults and may not use the face to compensate for the information they miss when listening in noisy situations.
“No one has been able to show whether children that young benefit from seeing the face whenever they are hearing speech,” she said. “We know that in a noisy situation, or in adults with hearing impairment, whenever the speech is degraded in some way, people look at the face of the person speaking for extra information to help piece together the signal. We know infants are sensitive to that sort of information, but the ability to use the information develops with age.
“I hope that by using discrimination, a lower level of perception than used in previous research, we can demonstrate that children use visual speech information at a younger age than previous literature suggests.”
DECEMBER 2010
FRANCISCO PARADA
Francisco Parada
If you were to visit Francisco Parada in the Imaging Research Facility lab, you wouldn't see his desk at first. Instead, you'd see scattered papers, a computer, water bottles, balloons from his birthday a few weeks ago, and musical instruments propped underneath. Compared to the other students in the lab, it's a little messy, and he's the first to admit it. But sit down and speak with Parada about his research and it's clear that he not only knows how to pull information buried in piles on his desk, but also pull information hidden within our brains.
"For most of my life, I was a musician more than a scientist. I started studying music when I was fifteen in Chile, and I spent more than ten years there doing music," ,he said. At his Dad's request, Parada switched gears to study psychology at the university when he was eighteen but continued a 'double life' until he was twenty one. Psychology in Chile is similar to psychology here in the 1950's or 1970s, Parada said, where researchers are debating if it should be considered a science or not; because the focus is mainly clinical and based on psychoanalysis.
"It didn't hold my attention, but it also wasn't interfering with my career as a musician so I kept doing it. Eventually I got to my first neuroscience class -- and it was a milestone."
His enthusiasm for neuroscience led him to a spot as a teaching assistant for a neuroscience class one hour a week. After two years, the department gave him his own section of the class to teach.
"I was really excited about neuroscience and science in general, but in Chile, it seemed like a dream, that it wasn't possible for me. The science groups in Chile are really small and why would they pick me when there are kids who were working on this stuff from early on and I had a late interest in this. So I gave it a shot and decided to apply to a MA degree in Chile. Just to see how it goes. Since I was a musician already, I wasn't worried about stability," he said.
The scientific community in the MA program was good for Parada. He spent a lot of time in the lab and that's where he discovered electroencephalography (EEG), a method of measuring brain waves by putting electrodes on the skin to measure brain activity.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is an older technique, he said, "but it was mind blowing. You can use it to measure the brain directly and associate brain activity with cognitive processes".
Parada knew that if he wanted to continue to work in neuroscience he would eventually have to leave Chile and start a Ph.D. program in the U.S. or Europe. Because of his experience with the EEG, he eventually connected with Dr. Tom Busey at IU, who offered him a position in his lab as a manager working with undergraduates completing honors theses. Parada also worked with Dr. Busey and his collaborators to develop an open source eye tracking system, another method to measure gaze activity in the brain. With Dr. Busey's support, Parada became a doctoral student at IU.
Developing an open source eye tracker is a huge break through, Parada said. "Usually the cheapest one is maybe $60,000, which is a lot. The principle itself is not that complicated, in the sense that it uses math to calculate where you're looking with good accuracy." Parada and Busey's version requires two cameras and the eye tracking program, which can be downloaded from the internet, all of which Parada estimates might cost around $300 shopping online.
Currently Parada is collaborating with a graduate student in the Art Department who doesn't have the money to buy an eye tracker, but who would like to collect data from subjects to figure out what parts of his artwork are most attractive in the hope this will help improve his artwork. Open source also means eye trackers could be used in schools, sports, and other educational settings in ways that have been cost-prohibitive before.
What really blows the mind, however, is what Parada is working on now.
With the help of Dr. Busey, he wrote routines that allow two opposing methods to work together to create eye-tracker-guided-EEG. This allows a researcher to measure brain waves while a person is engaged in self-paced, everyday activities, which is not how it's always been.
"These techniques do not play well together," said Dr. Puce, his adviser, "they are like putting a cat and a dog in a bag together. It's groundbreaking work."
The EEG connects a hat made from linked together electrodes - it looks like high tech chain mail - with a machine to boost the tiny electric signals coming from the brain, and feeds them into a computer.
"When you measure brain waves from the outside (like with an EEG), because the waves are so small, the skin, skull, and liquid around the brain filters out the waves. Eyes are like batteries. Move your eyes and you send electric waves all over skull and they wash out your data. In EEG, the first thing you tell a subject is to hold still and don't move your eyes. This leads to really boring tasks," Parada said.
"What I did was combine the EEG with the eye tracker, which introduces a lot of noise to the brainwaves measured by the EEG. Then we figured out a way to remove the electric signal of the eye movement from the EEG data in order to recover the brainwave data. It's a method that allows you to do more naturalistic stuff," he said.
For example, Parada is collaborating with a graduate student at the Stone Age Institute studying stone tool making in hominids and early humans. Making stone tools requires fast decision making (and lots of eye movement) because the subject must hit one stone with another stone in precise movements.
"Using an MRI to scan the brain has been used for this kind of research, but is too slow for the kind of question that the Stone Age Institute group is asking; but the EEG is fast, it can do the job. You can look at data with resolution of milliseconds", Parada said. "Using the new analytical method, we should be able to connect the subject to an EEG and an eye tracker, have the subject make a tool and see brain waves in real time, while doing real tasks. Theoretically this should work; it currently works in the computer. The next step is getting it to work in the real world."
Parada may have had a non-traditional route to neuroscience, and he still writes music for a 5-piece Nüjazz/Zeuhl combo www.baitonik.com, but he thinks he might have found his place in science.
"I wasn't the nerd in the class or the guy with the best grades, but science is perhaps the best place for someone like me. I can be unorganized, or work odd hours, but if I get things done and I innovate, I might do a good job as a scientist after all. It's a perfect fit for me."
NOVEMBER 2010
RACHEL SMITH
Rachel Smith
Rachel Smith is a doctoral student in the department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Studies at Indiana University. She is studying leisure behavior with a concentration in Therapeutic Recreation, and she owes her career choice to her college roommate from freshman year.
“My roommate had a boyfriend,” Rachel said. “One Thursday, I was going into my room and it was ‘occupied.’ I decided I didn’t want to eat dinner by myself at 4:30 pm, so I went to this review section for my statistics class over in the HPER building. I wasn’t really sure where it was exactly because I hadn’t been to one of the labs yet that semester, and it was already October, but I finally found it and I took a seat. After a little while I realized I had gone to the wrong room. It ended up being an interest meeting for the Therapeutic Recreation club that puts on all these weekend camps for kids with developmental disabilities. I was so embarrassed I volunteered for all their camps.”
A few years later, Rachel graduated from the University of Tennessee in English and Psychology and got into law school, just as she had planned. “It was terrible. I left one of the sessions on the introductory day for law school and called one of my professors -- ‘Doc’ was his name -- I said, ‘hey Doc, do you have room for one more grad student this semester?’ He said, ‘Yup’ and I filled out the paperwork and started right then.”
What is therapeutic recreation? Rachel says it’s an allied health service in the same vein as occupational or physical therapy focusing on the use of recreation to restore, remediate and rebuild function. In her work, Rachel looks at ways to use physical activity and leisure as a way of decreasing obesity and increasing social functioning in patients, specifically in children with autism.
She works on four different research teams, three of which are currently putting out research articles: the Therapeutic Recreation Research Team; Severe Mental Illness Research Team; Bradford Woods Research; and Disability Studies in Physical Activity Research Team. Rachel has also been highly active within her discipline at IU -- teaching, serving as a leader amongst her peers, and presenting her research at national conferences.
Her pride and joy, however, is in developing and running the Physical Activity and Social Skills Development (PASSD) service learning program. The PASSD program partners Indiana University Therapeutic Recreation (TR) with Stone Belt, one of the oldest and largest service providers for individuals with developmental disabilities in south central Indiana. Through the program, TR students at IU receive training opportunities and the Stone Belt participants are provided with high quality TR services.
“I get to help people live a higher quality of life,” she said. “Physical therapy can teach someone to use their knee again, but recreational therapists come in and ask ‘now that you can walk, what do you want to do, what do you love to do’ -- let’s do that to help you. We look at that next step.”
For example, Rachel taught children with autism to rock climb then helped them start a rock climbing club at their school. The children will then be seen as successful at something by their classmates, she said, sometimes for the first time ever.
“Children tend to see other children with autism at their worst point, at school, because that’s the hardest [place for children with autism to fit in]. If people knew me only as the person who is terrible at being still, for the thing I was worst at, for example, it would be a really hard life to live,” she said.
“I like to turn that on it’s head, so the child with autism is the expert -- the best climber in the group -- so the children are modeling after them instead of the other children being the model. A lot of times children will forget about the autism part then. ‘Oh he’s such a great climber!’ It really does change the way other people perceive [children with autism], and to be truly accepted in a community, you need to be perceived as being related, being competent and connected.”
Rachel works on inclusion and community integration, she said. For children with autism having trouble integrating into a school, recreation can serve as a bridge into that community.
“To me, recreation and leisure are the true universal languages because people can’t necessarily play better than other people. They can play differently than other people, but the skills can be taught and practiced,” she said.
Therapeutic Recreation is what Rachel calls a discovery major. “Almost everyone you meet has a story, because people don’t know about it -- it’s something you have to discover. And I’m very glad I did because I think I’d be an unhappy lawyer.”
The GPSO and TUGS commend and thank Rachel for her exemplary work as an IU graduate student!
