I am attending the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference (https://www.cogneurosociety.org/general-information/schedule/), April 2-5, 2016. This year’s CNS conference has symposiums on variety of topics including: computational psychiatry, memory reactivation, prediction error and cognitive control, working memory training, and affective-motivational salience. This year’s program and these symposiums in particular are very relevant to the projects proposed in my NRSA application, which I will submit in August and which will serve as an roadmap for my dissertation studies.  

In addition to the symposiums, there are several professional development seminars I will attend including: a panel on professional development for trainees in cognitive neuroscience and a session on writing and reviewing publications held by a panel of journal editors. These seminars will provide opportunities for professional development in writing and career planning beyond that which I would receive from regular interactions with my research mentors. 

In addition to attending the CNS meeting, I will use the opportunity to meet with two collaborators at Rutgers University, Elizabeth Tricomi and Mauricio Delgado (March 30-31, April 6), to discuss the specifics of their contributions to the projects in my NRSA application and to further develop the ideas for these projects. This formal collaboration between my previous mentors at Rutgers and my current mentor at Virginia Tech will allow me to extend my previous research on perceptions of control and reward processing to the clinical populations studied in the lab of Dr. John Richey (my current advisor).  Through this collaboration, we plan to develop a novel therapeutic intervention to increase perceptions of control in an anhedonic population in order to invigorate reward processing, known to be deficient in anhedonia. This project will form at least one of my dissertation studies. 


CNS 2016 Costs

CNS student membership  $35
CNS registration $220

Train: Roanoke to Newark: $97
Train: Newark to Roanoke: $97

Inner-City Travel: 
	18 PATH train trips: $ 43 
	7-day unlimited Metro pass: $31

Per Diem for Meals:  $60 x 9 days = $540


Total: $1,063