November 2021
Wani and Jaejoong received awards from the Korean Society for Human Brain Mapping (KHBM 2021)
Congratulations, Wani and Jaejoong! Wani received the Outstanding Achievement Award (학술상 본상), and Jaejoong received the Outstanding Trainee Award (우수 수련 연구자상). The KHBM was established in 2002 for the purpose of exchanging academic and technical information and building up Koreans characteristic brain mapping data on their own. It is a well-known academic association on brain function in Korea that leads research to study cognitive functions using cutting-edge imaging tools such as EEG/MEG, SPECT, PET and fMRI. The KHBM Outstanding Achievement Award that Wani received is the most prestigious award in the field of brain function mapping, and it is given to one person every year by comprehensively evaluating the research achievements of the lead author for last three years as a regular member of KHBM.
October 2021
Eunjin received SKKU graduate best paper award (SKKU 대학원생 논문대상 최우수상)
Congratulations, Eunjin! She received SKKU graduate best paper award with her paper entitled, “Free Association-based Dynamic Signature of Trait Affectivity.”
Soo Ahn received a Biomedical Global Leadership Training grant
Congratulations, Soo Ahn! The Biomedical Global Leadership Training grant (from the Korean gov.) will support her visits to the world-leading labs up to one year (travel, visa, rent, stipend, etc.). Special thanks to Prof. Tor Wager (CANlab, Dartmouth) for his kind support for Soo Ahn’s visit to his lab. We are happy and very excited to see Soo Ahn’s new journey in their academic life.
September 2021
We launched a new research project on chronic pain
We just started a new journey to help better understand and treat chronic pain with fMRI and computational methods. This study started with a serious question whether we can really develop clinically useful neuroimaging tools. This study has multiple unique aspects compared to previous pain studies, but one among them is that we approach to pain with the following two components, “body” and “meaning”. We believe that “body” and “meaning” will be the key components to understand chronic pain, and we will design fMRI tasks to better understand these two components in the brain. We hope that our study will eventually help you, your family members, and neighbors (and even us) who suffer from chronic pain.
August 2021
Cocoan Lab photo for 2021 (Aug 12th, 2021)
July 2021
Wani gave multiple talks at international conferences (including CPS, IASP, OHBM, and HPS)
Wani gave multiple talks at international and domestic conferences. Some selected talks include Canadian Pain Society (4/29/2021), IASP (6/9/2021), OHBM (6/21-25/2021), and Human Pain Seminar series (7/6/2021). Fortunately, we have videos of the talks. Click the links above if you want to watch the talks. For the Human Pain Seminar series, you might need to scroll down a little bit.
June 2021
Cocoan 101 is here!
Last semester, we made a collective effort to make video lectures (a total of 110 videos, > 28 hours total duration) to provide newcomers to the lab with the basic knowledge about what we are doing in the lab, called Cocoan 101. It covers from the lab philosophy, doing experiments, fMRI preprocessing, advanced fMRI analysis methods and to further study materials and key papers. So many gems here. We decided not to post the playlist link online (in a public place), but we allow sharing the link personally. So if you are interested in watching the Cocoan 101, send a note to any lab members to share the link. I am so proud of this!!
Feb 2021
Cocoan’s Research page is finally updated after four years!
For the last four years, our research topics have been evolved quite a lot, and thus Wani has wanted to update the old research page for a long time. However he couldn’t touch it because it is a time-consuming job. Wani ended up asking for help from Cocoans, and we together managed to make drafts for multiple research topics through a division of labor. On Dec 10, we started to work on it, and had a lab research presentation meeting on Dec 17. Wani recorded all the presentations because he thought it’s an important moment in the Cocoan history. Now, Wani is not the only captain of the Cocoan ship, but we all together are now driving the Cocoan ship. Wani will make a video sketch soon when he has time to share this glorious moment! :)
For now, we are sharing a couple of pictures from the Dec 10 lab meeting.
Jan 2021
Jaejoong’s paper has been published on Nature Medicine
Paper title: “A Neuroimaging Biomarker for Sustained Experimental and Clinical Pain” (1st author: Jaejoong Lee, PhD student in the Cocoan lab) Nature | PDF
(Left to right: Soo Ahn Lee, Jae-Joong Lee (first author), Choong-Wan Woo (corresponding author), Hongji Kim)
This is Jaejoong’s first project in the Cocoan lab that he started since he joined the lab around 3.5 years ago. It’s been a long journey, and I cannot fully express how much effort Jaejoong and Wani have put in this project. Huge congrats, Jaejoong, and we are so proud of this work. See the video abstract below.