Dec 2020
Cocoanlab at 2020 CNIR workshop
Our lab participated in the 2020 CNIR workshop, where all lab members conducted poster presentations. Jaejoong, Lada, and Jiwon received awards with prize money! Congratulations! Great work everyone.
Nov 2020
Lada and Jaejoong received the Outstanding Trainee Award and the Poster Presentation Award from the Korean Human Brain Mapping (KHBM). Congratulations!
Oct 2020
Hongji and Suhwan have been selected to receive a Biomedical Global Leadership Training grant
Congratulations, Hongji and Suhwan! The Biomedical Global Leadership Training grant (from the Korean gov.) will support their visits to the world-leading labs up to one year (travel, visa, rent, stipend, etc.). Special thanks to Prof. Emily Finn (FINN lab, Dartmouth) and Prof. Liz Losin (SCN Lab, Univ. of Miami) for their kind support for Hongji and Suhwan’s visits to their labs, respectively. We are happy and very excited to see Hongji and Suhwan’s new journey in their academic life.
Sep 2020
Byeol is selected to receive the Fulbright scholarship for her PhD in the US
Congratulations, Byeol! Byeol (a post-master researcher in the lab) has been selected as a principal candidate of the Fulbright graduate study program for her PhD in the US. This means a lot to Wani because Wani was also a fulbrighter, and Byeol follows his path now. But it doesn’t mean that Byeol will be same to Wani. Byeol will be bigger and more successful in the academia than Wani because Wani got her back. Byeol, now it’s the time to choose the US lab, which will be lucky to have you.
Wani received an Online Teaching Award from SKKU
Wani taught a basic statistics course online for undergrad students last semester. Thanks to the students from three different undergrad programs (GBME, Pharmacy, and Biotech), Wani enjoyed the class quite a lot. TMI: after he started the online class, Wani became a YouTuber with more than 130 subscribers now, and started to make some music as a hobby to use them as intro/outro music for his YouTube lectures.
Wani was on TV (YTN Science forum)
Wani gave a talk at YTN Science Forum. Check it out. You can see the slides that I made for this talk here (fyi, the talk has been edited by YTN)
June 2020
Posters and Talks at OHBM 2020
I’m proudly introducing our lab’s contribution to OHBM2020 (which became a virtual meeting) with multiple posters and a talk. Especially, Hongji, Lada, and Suhwan made really cute and awesome short introduction videos, so please check them out.
Hong-Ji Kim et al. “Getting Personal: Brain Decoding of Valence and Self-relevance of Personal Thoughts using Personal Stories”
Suhwan Gim et al. “Temporal understanding of neural mechanisms in pain prediction and perception”
Lada Kohoutová et al. “Individual variability of regional multivariate patterns in pain prediction”
Cocoan Lab photo for Spring 2020 (June 18th, 2020)
Mar 2020
Lada’s paper is published on Nature Protocols
Paper title: “Towards a unified framework for interpreting machine learning models in neuroimaging” (1st author: Lada Kohoutová, PhD student in the Cocoan lab) Nature | PDF | 중앙일보
This was Lada’s first project in the Cocoan lab that she started since she joined the lab around three years ago. The project name was XAIN (explainable AI in Neuroimaging). The idea of the project began with Wani and Tor’s 2017 review paper on Nature Neuroscience. The peer reviews on the 2017 paper were very challenging, and one reviewer suggested providing the detailed steps for the interpretation of predictive models because we put great emphasis on the importance of building interpretable models in that paper. Though we couldn’t fully addressed that comment in the 2017 paper, Wani kept that suggestion in his mind and wanted to work on that soon. When Lada joined the lab, the Cocoanlab was new, and no experiment was going on (because the IRB was pending at that time). Thus it was the perfect timing for this project. Along the way, Prof. Taesup Moon’s team joined the project because he was also interested in the explainable AI and using deep learning models on neuroimaging data. Sungwoo also joined the project to provide his help with the python code in the paper.
We cannot forget the moment when we got a positive email from Nature Protocols that they were interested in our presubmission inquiry and the synopsis. It was right before the 2018 SfN started (November 2018). We were so excited and grateful! After around 3 years since we started this project, our hard work finally pays off! Huge congrats, Lada, and we are so proud of this work. See the video abstract below.</span>
Feb 2020
Hongji featured in an IBS Vlog for the CNIR “일단 뜨겁게 연구하라!”
She nicely shows how we study pain in the brain! Donghee and Sungwoo also appeared briefly in the video. :) Have fun watching!
Wani’s co-authored paper has been published at Nature Human Behaviour
Paper title: “Neural and Sociocultural Mediators of Ethnic Differences in Pain” (1st author: Elizabeth A. Reynolds Losin, U of Miami)
It has been long time since we started this study. My role in this study was to help Liz with data analysis and figures. Liz has been a great project leader and also a great writer. I enjoyed working with her. In terms of the study findings, minorities (in this case, African Americans, in the context of the U.S.) can feel more pain even with the similar levels of heat and pain-processing brain activity. This increased pain is related to the previous discrimination experiences and the current attitude about discrimination, and also the increased pain was mediated by the brain regions that are related to pain valuation and meaning. This increased pain in African Americans is REAL and should NOT be ignored or devalued. We know how it feels like when we go through pain. Pain is not a mere reflection of noxious stimulus intensity. Rather, pain is constructed by the multiple systems in the brain, which combines the external sensory information with meaning, past experiences, beliefs, and contexts. Hopefully this study (and other studies from our lab) could help people to see this rich internal and subjective experiences of pain and suffering, leading us to more empathic society with better interventions.
This study has been featured in some Korean news outlets 동아사이언스 and 동아일보 (see below)
See the publication here.
Jan 2020
Jaejoong’s first co-first-author paper has been published at Journal of Clinical Neurology
Paper title: “Individual-Level Lesion-Network Mapping to Visualize the Effects of a Stroke Lesion on the Brain Network: Connectograms in Stroke Syndromes” (1st co-first author: Jae-Sung Lim, Hallym University)
Two years ago, our lab started a collaborative project with Prof. Jaesung Lim, MD, PhD on the functional connectivity changes in stroke patients. Jaejoong provided his expertise in fMRI data analysis, including preprocessing, functional connectivity analysis, and connectogram visualization, and Dr. Lim wrote the paper based on the analysis results. This collaboration has been really fruitful, and Wani has been enjoying working with Dr. Lim. We are currently collecting and analyzing large-scale, multi-site stroke fMRI data, which will greatly help understand and predict the functional outcomes of stroke patients based on their functional connectivity patterns. Thus stay tuned.
See the publication here.