Dec 2019
Jaejoong received the Outstanding Research Award from the Asian Pain Symposium
Jaejoong presented his work on the Tonic Pain Signature at the Asian Pain Symposium (Dec 5-7, Incheon, Korea) and got selected to receive the Outstanding Research Award. Congratulations, Jaejoong! We are about to submit this work to a journal really soon. Stay tuned!
Oct 2019
Society for Neuroscience (SFN) 2019 at Chicago
Seven of us attended the SFN this year, and Byeol, Hongji, Jaejoong, and Sooahn presented their work there. Many great scientists from all around the world visited our posters, including Siri Leknes and Emily Finn (who are in the pictures). We were grateful for all their invaluable inputs to our ongoing research.
During this SFN, we stayed in an airbnb house together. One day, Wani made personalized eggs for lab members. Not sure whether all enjoyed the eggs, but Wani did his best. Because of the jetlag, we all were extremely tired, and it gave us the opportunity to take funny pictures! :)
IBS conference on Neuroimaging
Our IBS center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (CNIR) held an IBS conference on Neuroimaging with amazing speakers. We were extremely lucky to invite many renowned neuroimaging scientists around the world, including Jim Haxby, Jack Gallant, Peter Bandettini, Jonathan Pollimeni, Seiji Ogawa, Kamil Ugurbil, Ravi Menon, Afonso Silva, etc. and “THE” SPECIAL GUEST for us was TOR WAGER, our academic father (for Wani) and grandfather (for the rest of the lab members)!!! We had such a great time with him. We introduced him Chimac (korean style fried chicken and beer) and Somaek (soju + beer), and he told us many interesting stories. It was a great night. We hope all of them, including Tor, to come to Korea again in the near future (maybe for OHBM 2021). Until then, we will do a great science to share exciting stuff with them.
Sep 2019
Lab photo for 2019 Fall semester
*Three people on the left side (Jieun, Wootae, and Eunjoo) were visiting our lab from the visual cognitive neuroscience lab.
Sungwoo, Donghee, and Wani attended the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference at Berlin.
This was our first time at CCN, and we really enjoyed the talks and posters there. We attended the conference to expand our research to include more computational components in our studies. We met many people that we knew only through twitter, meaning the CCN was the right place to meet people who we are interested in!
We did a lab activity at the first lab meeting of the Fall semester, the SWOT analysis
Here is the SWOT list that lab members came up with (without Wani!). It was a fun activity! I believe that accurately knowing what we are strong at and in which area we have weaknesses is the first step to grow. Let’s make our lab healthier together! How exciting!
Aug 2019
Wani gave a pain talk at IBS 우리동네과학토크 series
Byeol and Yongwook are awarded a Master’s degree
Congratulations, Byeol and Yongwook.
Wani received the Jaeil Kim Young Scholar Paper Award (김재일소장학자논문상) from the Korean Psychological Association (한국심리학회)
Congrats!
Wani gave a tutorial session on RSA at KHBM summer school
Wani was asked to give a tutorial session on Representational similarity analysis (RSA) by the Korean Society for Human Brain Mapping (KHBM), where he serves as a staff member. The tutorial slides, codes, and data are available at https://github.com/cocoanlab/khbm2019_RSA_tutorial.
Yejong’s surprise for us
July 2019
Jiwon Jeon, Mijin Kim, Suhye Kim successfully completed CNIR/GBME summer internship program at the cocoanlab.
They worked on the “cognitive map” project. The activity they did: Literature review (they are now cognitive map experts!), code implementation (see hex_glm1.m and hex_glm2.m), and fMRI data analysis using the code. I enjoyed the last four weeks with them. Jiwon and Suhye decided to spend one more month in our lab.
June 2019
Soo Ahn successfully completed her first experiment on Pleasure and Pain.
Soo Ahn finished her last scan after 15 months she started the project. We asked about her feelings. Sungwoo will start his experiment soon, which will be one-year long experiment. We asked for a word from him.
Suhwan and Lada successfully presented their beautiful work at the OHBM meeting
Suhwan gave a poster presentation on “Understanding the neural mechanisms of temporal dynamics of integrating prediction into pain perception”, and Lada gave a poster presentation on “Interpreting machine learning models in neuroimaging: a unified framework.” We look forward to posting our work on a preprint server soon. Stay tuned!
April 2019
Wani’s paper, “Cognitive self-regulation influences pain-related physiology,” has been accepted to PAIN and chosen as an Editor’s Choice article
In the paper, we developed physiological markers for pain and found that cognitive self-regulation of pain operates on the level of autonomic nervous system, producing physiologically meaningful changes. This work is done in collaboration with Gordon, a postbac RA in Tor’s lab, and under a supervision of Tor. Below, you can find a video abstract. You can see the most recent version of the paper (for free) here, and an old twitter thread where I provided a high-level summary of the paper. Data and code is available here.
Yongwook’s paper, “False-positive neuroimaging: Undisclosed flexibility in testing spatial hypotheses allows presenting anything as a replicated finding”, has been accepted to NeuroImage
In the paper, we implemented a Bayes factor calculator for the Bayesian MANOVA using the BRMS package in R and made a website to provide a web-based service of the analysis. Check out the paper and code.
Cocoan’s Values
Mar 2019
Lab Photo for 2019
We will take a lab photo every year on the first day of lab meeting of the spring semester (in South Korea, the spring semester starts at March).
Mar 2019
National Research Foundation of Korea selected us to support our research for the next four years (2019-2022)
Our lab will be supported by the Basic Science Research Program for early career researchers through the National Research Foundation of Korea (한국연구재단) for the next four years. The research grant will support us to develop and validate fMRI-based pain biomarkers using 3T and 7T MRI and machine learning.
Feb 2019
A new paper on Neuroethics in South Korea has been published on Neuron
See the paper here
Jan 2019
Yongwook’s paper got 200 likes on twitter!
Wani posted a tweet on the paper (biorxiv preprint) two days ago, and it got 200 likes within two days. See the preprint here and the tweet
Yanghi Kim (undergrad RA) joined the Cocoan lab!
We will post her research interests and brief introduction here soon.