SPOTLIGHT - PROFESSOR SRINIVASAN
This week's spotlight was with Professor Srinivasan. He is the Department Chair and professor in the Cognitive Sciences. Previously, he has taught COGS 110 (Quantitative Methods) as well as PSYCH 114M (Matlab Programming). He will be teaching COGS 14P (Python for Cognitive Science) and possibly PSYCH 160H (History of Cognitive Neuroscience). His current research is on the "integrative function of the brain in cognition".
Here's what he wants you to know!
What lab do you work in? What kind of research do you do in your lab?
Professor Srinivasan works in the Human Neuroscience Lab. In this lab, there are two major focuses:
- Decision Making, Motor Learning (collaborates with the UCI Medical School on motor learning and stroke rehabilitation)
- Modeling EEG signals
Previous work included work in spatial and feature attention, and consciousness.
Do you have any advice for students who may be interested in joining your lab?
Although there currently aren't opportunities right now due to COVID, there will be research opportunities during the Fall quarter.
The main requirement for students to join the lab is to prepare themselves adequately by taking a programming class (preferably in Python or MATLAB). You must be comfortable with opening up a program, editing it, and getting it to work. It is also very valuable to have a good grasp of Experimental Psychology through an Experimental Psychology class. Furthermore, exposure to a Neuroscience course could be beneficial.
Is there a project that you have conducted, oversaw, etc. that you are particularly proud of?
Two of Professor Srinivasan's amazing achievements are his studies on awareness, which were some of the first in Experimental Neuroscience.
He also devised an entirely new way of presenting stimuli in experiments. Professor Srinivasan came up with the idea that instead of presenting stimuli statically, could present stimuli as flickering. So, one could “tag” each item on the screen with a flicker frequency. Based on this flicker frequency, researchers can identify the responses to discrete sensory inputs -- which is incredibly useful for studying attention.
Using this technique he tested the phenomenon called "Binocular Rivalry" where a subject is presented two stimuli, but was only aware of one at a time. Using the different tags for each stimuli, he could determine which stimulus the subject was aware of and how they responded. This helps us see how our brain processes information into conscious awareness.
Do you have any advice for students who want to pursue research in this field?
You will have to go to graduate school. To make yourself competitive for graduate school, he strongly recommends joining a lab and taking full responsibility for a project. When you interview for graduate school, you will be asked to describe a project you are working on in some detail and if you don’t have that depth of experience, it shows instantly. So pick something, and do it deeply!
What kinds of industry jobs can one pursue with this background?
More than half of the PhDs from the Human Neuroscience Lab have gotten industry jobs. One works at Apple, another works for a medical device company in LA, one works for an education software company in Irvine, and some work in army research labs. Through a combination of hard skills (ie. programming and data analysis) and soft skills (like communication and writing) there are endless posibilities inside and outside academia!
HIS MESSAGE FOR YOU:
He is looking forward to having you back on campus! Everything he hears as the Department Chair of the Cognitive Sciences Department tells him that students will be back in the Fall. Large classes will remain online, but smaller upper division classes are likely to have in-person options, so you will still get a chance to have a wonderful college experience at UCI.
|
