Throughout my academic years, I received training in conducting psychophysical experiments, social psychology experiments, statistical analysis, and computational programming. In addition with some level of neuroimaging data, such as fMRI, EEG, and MEG. Working as a research assistant at Dr. David Poeppel’s lab, Dr. Catherine Good’s lab, and Dr. Timothy Ellmore’s lab gradually expands my knowledge of studies in psychology and neuroscience. I am growing more and more interest about how data driven predictive models help us understand neurobiological factors in several domains, including clinical and computational neuroscience. Gaining experience in clinical neuroscience and neurobiology will narrow down my exploration of my passion in specific field in neuroscience and psychology.
I learn programming in Matlab, R, and Python during the Master program. My knowledge in multivariate calculus and statistical analysis enhance my ability of learning programming and introduce me the implementation of machine learning in neuroscience and psychology. Working in Poeppel’s lab, while immersing myself in dichotic listening studies, I design an experiment to investigate the ear advantage in Mandarin tones perception under different conditions, which are semantically meaningful and not meaningful. This ongoing study is running on Matlab and I am collaborating with Dr. Adeen Flinker and Dr. Xing Tian. After working on tutorials of several softwares in Ellmore’s lab, I manage to develop a general protocol of input/output script for EEG data management between Matlab and Python. This project aims to identify spindles and k-complex using machine learning based on examples graded by human and help human grading in the future. Using machine learning not only simplifies algorithms, but also helps us to classify what characterizes human graders think about when grading. All these experience give me opportunity to expose to modern data visualization and scientific interpretation. I have the necessary basic knowledge to implement machine learning to neuroscience research and apply appropriate regression model to quantitative psychology study.