Dec 2022
Cocoan lab’s end year party and CNIR’s workshop
Bye bye 2022, and hello 2023!
Lada and Jaejoong passed their PhD defenses
Congratulations, Lada and Jaejoong. They passed their Ph.D. defenses. Jaejoong’s thesis title was “Developing neuroimaging biomarker for sustained experimental and clinical pain,” and Lada’s thesis title was “Representations of neuroimaging-based predictive models of pain and beyond: validation and insight.” Congrats on their remarkable research achievements and on becoming a doctor!
Wani became an Associate director (부연구단장) of the IBS Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research
Wani was selected to be an associate director of the IBS Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (CNIR) starting from Dec 2022. Wani joined the center 6 years ago (March 2017), and thanks to the Cocoan lab’s great achievements and the help of all CNIR members (including the center director, Seong-Gi Kim), he was recommended to become an associate director early 2022. After a highly competitive and selective evaluation process for the last 8 months, he was finally promoted to associate director. Wani is so grateful for all your help!
Nov 2022
Society for Neuroscience 2022 at San Diego
Cocoan lab (Jaejoong, Lada, Hongji, Sooahn, Jungwoo, Donghee, Hyemin, and Youngeun) attended the annual meeting of SfN (Society for Neuroscience) held in San Diego. It was one of the first on-site conferences after the COVID era, and it was a great time to see other researchers and have poster presentations in person! We also met our beloved alumni, Byeol, and had a lab dinner together.
Our research was selected as 2022’s Top 100 research achievements (국가연구개발 우수성과 100선)
Congratulations, Cocoan lab! Our research has been selected as 2022’s top 100 research achievements. The title was “Developing neuroimaging-based pain biomarkers based on experimental pain.” The selection process is highly competitive. You can find more information (in Korean) here.
Wani received the Kim Chan Award (김찬학술상) from the Korean Pain Research Society
Congratulations, Wani! Wani received the Kim Chan Award from the Korean Pain Research Society. This award goes to the Korean pain researcher and medical doctors with the best research achievement based on this year’s publication.
Oct 2022
Hyemin received SKKU graduate best paper award (3rd place; SKKU 대학원생 논문대상 장려상)
Congratulations, Hyemin! She received SKKU graduate best paper award with her paper entitled, “Bodily maps of spontaneous thought”
Sep 2022
Jaejoong’s paper on dynamic functional reorganization during sustained pain is published in eLife
Paper title: “Functional brain reconfiguration during sustained pain” (1st author: JaeJoong Lee, currently a PhD candidate) eLife | PDF
This paper means a lot to me (Wani is writing). This is the first-ever Cocoan paper that only contains Cocoan lab members as authors. I was so proud of this paper—I liked the experiments, methods, our findings, and figures. I liked every bit of the paper, but different from my expectation, we received 6 (or 7) desk rejects in a row from journals. This was my first experience getting this many desk-rejects. Of course, I have papers that needed to go through this many “rejections,” but in those cases, I at least got reviewer comments before getting rejected, and thus I could improve my paper and re-try. However, this time, it was quite frustrating given that we could not even know why we got rejected. To know why, I sent the paper to Tor (my PhD advisor) and solicited his comments on the paper. He graciously sent me his detailed thoughts on the paper, and at the end of the comment, he wrote:
You know this, but I’ll remind us both: Many things in these high-profile journals are not as important as they seem, and many really important and useful scientific products are not in the high-profile journals. Many of the most important actual advances will never be in Science or Nature because they don’t “fit the mold” but are great, careful science.
We were encouraged and chose to be persistent. We tried again and again and finally got a chance to get reviewed. We’ve received challenging, but constructive, reviews from eLife, and it has finally been published on eLife. This paper is still one of my favorites in my mind, and I am so proud of this paper. And Jaejoong did a great great great job all the way through. Lastly, I want to share our cover letter that we had to re-re-re-…-re-write to pass the desk.
Aug 2022
Byeol’s paper on free association and its brain representations is published in Science Advances
Paper title: “When self comes to a wandering mind: Brain representations and dynamics of self-generated concepts in spontaneous thought” (1st author: Byeol Kim, lab alumni, currently a PhD student at Dartmouth) Science Advances | PDF
(Left to right: Choong-Wan Woo (corresponding author), Byeol Kim (1st author), Jihoon Han, Eunjin Lee, Jessica Andrews-Hanna)
We started this project Summer 2017 right after Byeol joined the lab with a group of undergrad students. It took the full five years to publish this, but finally! This project uses free association, which has a long history (e.g., Galton, 1879), but was largely ignored by modern sciences because of its qualitative nature. We believed that free association could provide meaningful and rich information about one’s inner life, and recent advances in computational sciences including natural language processing and artificial intelligence can bring it back to science. We see a huge potential in free association. This paper is just the beginning of this journey, and we have more papers in preparation. If you are interested in this task and working on this project, please let us know!
Video abstract
July 2022
Cocoan Lab photo for 2022 (July 18th, 2022)
This year, we participated in the CNIR photo day to take our Cocoan lab photos. Here are some!
May 2022
Lada published a paper titled “Individual variability in brain representations of pain” on Nature Neuroscience
Paper title: “Individual variability in brain representations of pain” (1st author: Lada Kohoutová, PhD student in the Cocoan lab) Nature | PDF
(Left to right: Donghee Lee, Lada Kohoutová (first author), Choong-Wan Woo (corresponding author), Sungwoo Lee)
Lada, as a follow-up of her 2020 Nature Protocols paper, examined the individual variability of pain predictive maps and identified brain regions that have consistent vs. variable pattern-level representations of pain. We got our main findings from 13 datasets from Tor and Christian’s lab (discovery dataset), and replicated the main findings in a large-scale dataset (n = 124) collected by Sungwoo and Donghee. This was a huge team effort, and so congratulations to all and esp. Lada.
Video abstract
March 2022
Wani opened a YouTube channel, called 신인류 with Prof. Prof. Seokjun Hong
Through this 신인류 youtube channel, we will discuss human-level artificial intelligence from the perspective of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology.