Grad News Forum

Everywhere researchers go, be it a conference, a job interview, or simply meeting a colleague in the hallway, people ask the obvious question: “So tell me about your work?” It goes without saying that the ability of researchers to describe their research in lay language efficiently is one of the most important skills to be acquired, regardless of the field of research.

On Monday, April 29, assistant dean of Graduate Student Affairs, Kerry Landers, initiated a speed researching event aimed at developing students’ communication skills. In this event, students were expected to explain their research to their smart, but not expert, colleagues in only two minutes!

“We have received feedback from faculty who attended the recent Graduate Poster Session and were impressed with many of our graduate students’ ability to explain their research to non-experts,” notes Landers. “The goal of this speed researching event was to provide another opportunity for graduate students to continue to improve this essential skill.”

At the event, a total of 10 students explained their research to each other in pairs over lunch, followed by a two-minute constructive comments session. Students came from programs in biology, chemistry, engineering, genetics, MALS, and physics and astronomy. A wide range of research topics were discussed, including black holes, prion diseases, and the causes of the Arab Spring. Each student had the opportunity to present his or her research five times, providing plenty of practice.

“This event was great! I now know what other students in genetics, engineering, and chemistry do,” commented Daniel Durcan, a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies student, who also serves as the graduate student activities coordinator. Durcan continued, “The clarity for the presentations was very impressive. I thought it was a great opportunity to practice explaining my research to students from other disciplines.”

The event was somewhat similar to the Three-Minute Research Presentation sessions held by the Graduate Studies Office in the past. However, there is a subtle difference in emphasis between the two events. The Three-Minute Research Presentation sessions involve a single three-minute talk and aim to improve public speaking skills. On the other hand, “speed researching” aims to help students present their research swiftly to several people—a skill they will need at job fairs or conferences. Such a skill is crucial in a competitive academic environment.

Speed researching is, indeed, very helpful and from the looks of it, a very successful idea. Please keep your eyes open for the second speed researching event!

by Gilbert Rahme

The Graduate Forum would like to congratulate Sarah Henderson, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, on her new position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan, New York. Henderson plans to graduate this summer and begin working in New York City this June. She is currently finishing up her dissertation on the influence of ambivalence on executive functioning and cigarette smoker’s emotional and neural responses to smoking cues.

Henderson grew up in Cheshire, Connecticut, and completed her undergraduate studies at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, majoring in psychology and political science. After graduating, she worked as a paralegal at a law firm, but then quickly realized that she did not want to pursue a law career.

Next, Henderson worked as a research assistant at the Children’s National Medical Center, conducting quality of life research with children suffering from epilepsy, Tourette’s Syndrome, neurofibromatosis, and autism. To this day she remains involved with Brainy Camps, a week-long summer camp for children with chronic health conditions. In addition, she volunteers weekly at David’s House, a volunteer-run home-away-from-home dedicated to supporting the families of children being treated at the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

After working at the Children’s National Medical Center, Henderson worked for a contract research agency where she conducted pharmaceutical research for the National Institutes of Health. Following this, Henderson decided to come to Dartmouth to pursue her PhD in cognitive neuroscience in order to work with some of the top people in the field.

Henderson works with Professor Catherine Norris and employs fMRI and eye tracking as a means for studying ambivalence (i.e., emotional conflict), self-regulation, and addiction. Her dissertation examines how ambivalence, or the state of having contradictory feelings toward something, affects cognitive processing and subsequently, the regulation of cigarette smoking. For example, she found that when viewing images of smoking, participants with a desire to quit smoking showed less activity in reward regions of the brain and more activity in regions associated with internally directed attention.

In her time at Dartmouth, Henderson has presented posters at academic conferences, including the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, the Society for Social Neuroscience, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Henderson was also the recipient of the 2011 Basic Psychological Science Research Grant from the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students.

In her new postdoctoral fellowship position at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Henderson will research pediatric mood and anxiety disorders, using a variety of neuroimaging and neurobiological techniques. Along with her advisor, Vilma Gabbay, she will investigate new ways to improve the identification, diagnosis, and treatment of many of these disorders.

We wish Henderson all the best in her new position!

by Andrea Worsham

John Gartner: Using Lidar to Study Dam Removal and River Dynamics

Check out this video of recent poster session winner, John Gartner.

In the video, Gartner explains how researchers shoot lasers from a plane to map and understand the effects of dam removal on river current patterns.

Gear Up! in Baker Library main hall

What is the Discovery cluster? Is EndNote or Zotero better suited for your reference manager needs? How do you access the Dartmouth Secure network via Wi-Fi? The Gear Up! Build Your Research Toolkit event in Baker Library on January 29 provided insight into all of these questions and many more. Sponsored by the Library, Computing, and Office of Sponsored Projects, Gear Up! offered an informal introduction to many resources available for graduate students on campus.

Overall, Gear Up! consisted of a dozen tables organized by representatives with information about a variety of resources. Attendees could learn more about computing desktop support, mobile apps/devices, and copyright facts. In particular, three tables specifically related to graduate student needs: 1. Reference & PDF Managers (EndNote, Zotero, Papers), 2. Office of Sponsored Projects (funding opportunities and grants management), and 3. Metrics, Impact, & Staying Up-To-Date (impact factors and altmetrics, citation mapping).

Reference & PDF managers: While each reference manager performs similar utilities to aid research, each has its own set of unique advantages and disadvantages. For additional information about which is best for you, visit the library website.

Office of Sponsored Projects: Are you looking for funding sources, or need help formatting a grant/proposal? The Office of Sponsored Projects has two important resources, PIVOT and RAPPORT, to help!

Metrics, Impact, & Staying Up-To-Date: Overall, the term “impact factor” as applied to scientific journals is an outdated metric, neither considering social media nor per article impact. A web-based tool that uses multiple metrics to track impact factors for articles, datasets, or scientists is ImpactStory.

For more information, including dates for upcoming Gear Up! events, see the event website.

by Jeanine Amacher

A number of Dartmouth students, faculty and staff will be celebrating the holidays far from home, in fact, just about as far from home as you can get, unless you’re a penguin.

Starting around Antarctica Day on December 1–which celebrates the signing of the international treaty in 1959 that preserves Antarctica as a place for research and peaceful purposes–and continuing well past Hanukkah, Christmas, New Years, and even Martin Luther King Day, Dartmouth researchers will be living and working “on the ice,” the nickname for the most uninhabitable continent on earth. But the only continent with no permanent residents also has a lot of visitors, many of them researchers.

“The opportunity to work in Antarctica is a life-changing experience, and many first-timers catch ‘polar fever’ and head South year after year,” says Myers Family Professor Ross Virginia, an ecologist who has been working in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys since 1989, and even has an Antarctic geological feature named after him–Virginia Valley (see inset). In a few weeks he’ll be leaving for Antarctica as will earth sciences professor Bob Hawley, Linda Morris, Education Program Director for the Ice Drilling Program Office at Thayer, and Ruth Heindel, an earth sciences graduate fellow in Dartmouth’s NSF-funded IGERT program in polar environmental change.

For full article go to the Dickey Center online.

With the last group of fellows arriving on campus this fall, one might think things are winding down for Dartmouth’s IGERT program. But in reality, research and collaboration are starting to truly cook now that all of the fellows are on campus.

IGERT students and faculty members are seen on their research trip near the west coast of Greenland. (Photo by Alexandra Giese)

“We’re really starting to move rapidly,” says Ross Virginia, the Myers Family Professor of Environmental Science and the director of Dartmouth’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. As IGERT connects research to real world problems, Virginia says, “we’re trying to communicate science in insightful and meaningful ways.”

The program, which studies polar environmental change and supports Arctic research, is funded by a $3 million National Science Foundation grant. Since 2010, the program has facilitated collaboration across departments, conducted research in Greenland, and talked about climate change with diverse audiences—starting a conversation that’s expected to last for years.

IGERT provides two years of funding for PhD students at $30,000 per year. There are a total of 24 fellows—from the fields of engineering, ecology and evolutionary biology, and earth sciences—that connect through IGERT while working toward degrees in their home departments. Fellows take two IGERT core courses, which are taught by professors from different disciplines, and a five-week summer research trip to Greenland that serves as a capstone experience during their first year.

For full article, go to Dartmouth Now

About 140 miles northeast of Hanover, in the north country of New Hampshire, lies Dartmouth’s massive Second College Grant. While the Grant clearly offers fewer cultural events than Hanover, the rugged wilderness provides many unique research and recreational opportunities for Dartmouth students.

For the full article go to Dartmouth Now.

The Second College Grant was presented to Dartmouth by the State of New Hampshire in 1807 and is used for research, recreation, and sustainable logging. (photo by Eli Burakian ’00)