Dec 2018
Bonus!
Cocoan Lab’s 2018 end-year party
Wani’s letter to the lab:
Hope everyone went home well yesterday night. As I said to some people yesterday, 2018 was a critical year for our lab.
I think we were greatly successful. First and foremost, I like you all a lot. I feel “connected”. I’m enjoying working with you. My colleague profs call me “the king of meeting.” I think I can’t have that many meetings if I don’t enjoy it.
Second, we are doing good science of neuroimaging—we successfully finished a few projects (Caps, Semic, Fast) and some are ongoing (pico, pleasure). We submitted a revision of our first lab paper (replication), and working on a few more manuscripts (xain, caps, sequential). The most important thing is that many of you are taking a lead on your own projects now. As Byeol said yesterday, it’s important to have your own thoughts and ideas about how to solve the given problems. Ultimately, you should find the research questions that excite you the most (and also excite the PI as well 🙂) on your own. I think some of you are already getting there. In the near future, you will be able to do the research you want with a minimal help from me.
Third, we are successfully recruiting people—we’ve got sungwoo (thanks for coming to the cocoan lab) and other new undergrads who are excited to work in the lab. Lada entered our PhD program (thanks you!). I’m sorry that we lost some good people as well, but we are strong enough to be okay even after they left.
Let’s make 2019 a great year again. I will do my best to support your growth, to be available to you, and to come up with good research/analysis ideas (and grants). And let’s publish good papers, which will give you a great joy and happiness. 🙂
Thanks all!!!
Wani
Nov 2018
Jaejoong Lee and Byeol Kim successfully presented their beautiful work at the Society for Neuroscience 2018
Jaejoong gave a talk titled “An fMRI Signature of Tonic Pain: Based on whole-brain functional connectivity” at a Pain Neuroimaging Nanosymposium, and Byeol presented a poster titled “Dynamic modeling and brain decoding of internal thoughts and emotions.” We look forward to posting our work on a preprint server soon. Stay tuned!
Aug 2018
Jaejoong Lee is selected to receive the Global PhD Fellowship (GPF, 글로벌박사펠로우십) from Korean National Research Foundation.
Congratulations, Jaejoong! The GPF is highly competitive (this year, the competition rate was 5.3:1), but we knew Jaejoong would get it. :) Also great great job, Cocoanlab! All lab members helped him and worked together to make this happen. Wani said that he is so proud of Cocoanlab!
Three undergrad RAs (Hyebin Kim, Seeyun Lee, and Jihoon Han) joined the Cocoan lab!
Check out their research interests and brief introduction here.
Jul 2018
Yejin Chung and Wonkyung Choi successfully finished 2018 CNIR summer internship program.
For one-month period (6/25-7/20), Hongji (a grad student) and summer interns worked together on a very exciting new project on decoding stories based on brain activity. They almost completed experiment codes. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to fMRI data analysis. Yejin and Wonkyung, please come back to the lab if you’d like to continue the fMRI experiments and analyses you’ve started here. :)
A paper titled “Cognitive self-regulation influences pain-related physiology” was posted on bioRxiv
You can see the paper here, and I wrote some background story about the paper on twitter.
A paper titled “False-positive neuroimaging: Undisclosed flexibility in testing anatomical region-based hypotheses allows presenting anything as a replicated finding” (first author: Yongwook) has been submitted and now is under review
Jun 2018
Jaejoong and Byeol gave poster presentations at the annual meeting of the Korean Society for Cognitive Science, and Byeol received a Best Presentation Award. Congrats!
(Left top) Jaejoong, Suhwan, Hongji, Sooan, Jinwon, and Byeol. See Byeol’s face expression. She seems happy for the award. (Left bottom) Byeol is receiving the award. (middle) Byeol is presenting her work. (Right) Jaejoong is explaining his work to Dr. Yuki Kamitani (he was a plenary speaker of the conference).
Sangeun Yeom joined the Cocoan lab!
Check out her research interests and brief introduction here.
Mar 2018
Jin Oh joined the Cocoan lab!
Check out her research interests and brief introduction here.
Feb 2018
Seong Jae Park joined the Cocoan lab!
Check out his research interests and brief introduction here.
Jan 2018
A paper on “Generalizable representations of pain, cognitive control, and negative emotion in medial frontal cortex” is in press on Nature Neuroscience
Phil Kragel (a postdoc in Tor Wager’s lab) is the first author of the paper. Wani contributed to this study by sharing our recent fMRI data. Wani knew that this paper will become big from the beginning! :) Wani was so happy and appreciate to be a part of this study. Thanks, Phil. You did a great job!
Go to 2017 news link