Trainee Testimonials

Funding from the Dynamic Brain Circuits and Connections in Health and Disease enables students to engage in professional development and educational opportunities. 

From 2017-2019, we provided funding for 99 students to participate in courses and conferences.

In 2019, some of these opportunities included the Frontiers in Neurophotonics International Summer School, the Allen Institute Showcase Symposium 2019, and the Santa Barbara Advanced Multiphoton Course.

In 2017, these opportunities included NeuroFutures 2017 and a related Brain Clearing workshop, as well as activities on the Human Connectome, Human Brain Mapping, and Frontiers in Neurophotonics.

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS YEAR’S COURSES!

FRONTIERS IN NEUROPHOTONICS 

neurophotonics.ca

“This course was an amazing overview on the current techniques used in neurophotonics – covering both the theory of the techniques, as well as the usability through hands-on demos. I gained a new appreciation for the components of microscopes and the uses and limitations of various types of microscopy. It was also a wonderful networking environment, and I met many international faculty members and trainees that I would readily form collaborations with in future work!”
– Elisa York (PI: Dr. Brian MacVicar)

HUMAN CONNECTOME PROJECT

www.humanconnectomeproject.org

“The HCP course provided lecture and practical sections on each topic/modality. The lectures were very helpful and informative for people who are currently doing macroscale neuroimaging research as well as researchers/trainees who are planning to use brain image data in the near future (especially for multi-modal research). The lectures highlighted the important developments and introduced several approaches that have been validated. For new trainees, they learned the basic components of image processing and gained insights of which methods they can use in the future. For people who are in the field already, it was very helpful that the speakers explained the pros and cons of some methods that are still under debate. The practical sections allowed us to get familiar with the HCP pipeline and workbench, which is extremely helpful if trainees are planning to use the pipeline. However, due to limited time and practical reasons, we were not able to process the data from the beginning to the end. This is something that can be improved in the future. Overall, HCP course was a high-quality course and I gained a lot of insights of advanced processing approaches and the theory/meaning behind neuroimaging processing. The knowledge is very helpful to my research work.”
– Suejin Lin (PI: Dr. Martin McKeown)

FSL COURSE

fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fslcourse

“The FSL course introduced me to a new neuroimaging tool I plan to employ in my research. It was extrememly well structured: the lecturers were knowledgeable, willing to assist with questions ranging from very specific to very general concepts in neuroimaging. I learned knew concepts in structural and functional MRI, both theoretical and practical and will apply these concepts to my current research.”
– Cristina Rubino (PI: Dr. Lara Boyd)

For more information on how we’ve distributed cluster funds for trainee learning activities, email thmurphy@mail.ubc.ca.