OHBM Committees and Special Interest Groups activities: a Spring update
By Ilona Lipp
Postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. OHBM Communications Committee chair.
With the annual meeting coming up, it’s getting very busy around OHBM. If you’re wondering what some of our committees and special interest groups (SIGs) have been and are up to, read on!
Diversity and Inclusion Committee (DIC)
The DIC is preparing a triptych of events for June:
- The 4th annual DIC Symposium: The Asian perspective on the effects of social, cultural, and language barriers on inclusivity at OHBM - with Bharat Biswal (country of origin: India), Kangjoo Lee (country of origin: South Korea), Natasha Rajah (country of origin: Sri Lanka), Hiromasa Takemura (country of origin: Japan), and Chao-Gan Yan (country of origin: China)
- The 3rd edition of the Kids Live Review - featuring talks dedicated to children speaking English (Ghana), French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish
- The 2nd RoundTable Discussion on developing best practices for promoting EDI across our various organizations
Stay tuned for a dedicated blogpost with all the details coming soon!
Education committee
By Alex Fornito
The Education Committee received a total of 14 submissions for Educational Workshops at the 2022 Annual Meeting. From these submissions, 4 full-day and 8 half-day submissions were selected.
The final Educational Program covers a diverse range of topics that will be of general interest to the community. The speakers in each session are leaders in their respective fields and come from diverse demographic and geographic backgrounds.
Full-day workshops will cover fundamentals of network neuroscience, generative modelling of brain dynamics, brain parcellation, and the analysis of large neuroimaging datasets.
Half-day workshops will cover topics related to anatomy, function, and open science. Anatomy courses cover the use of quantitative MRI for non-invasive histology, using diffusion tractometry to understand white matter, and the impact of neuroanatomy on structural and functional neuroimaging. Courses related to function will cover time-varying connectivity, physiologic fMRI signals, and optical methods for human brain mapping. Finally, open science courses will cover how to write re-executable publications and how to cultivate open science in research and culture.
Due to budgetary and technical constraints, Educational Courses will not be live-streamed at the 2022 Meeting and will instead be run live for in-person attendees only. However, all sessions will be recorded and posted on OHBM OnDemand after the Meeting.
BrainArt SIG
By Zoltan Nagy
Greetings from the BrainArt SIG,
With the OHBM conference approaching, allow us serve you with a few a quick reminders!
As every year since 2010, we will hold a Brain Art Exhibition at the OHBM conference (both online and on-site in Glasgow). For this year’s theme, The Connected Brain, we invited an international group of artists to explore the idea of connectedness not only within but also among us - a significant aspect of our recent lives with COVID.
Soon we will be announcing the Brain Art Competition as well, over our twitter/instagram/website (see below) - where we hope to see many of your artworks.
Artworks from previous years’ events are compiled on our YouTube channel.
For those of you that would like to keep up with us more regularly, you can:
- visit our website: https://ohbm-brainart.github.io/
- join us on twitter: https://twitter.com/OHBM_BrainArt
- follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ohbm_basig
Finally, we are always happy to connect and collaborate. If you’d like to reach out to us we’ll be glad to hear from you at ohbm.brainart@gmail.com.
Student-Postdoc (SP) SIG
By Elisa Guma and Anne Bilot
The Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group (SP SIG) provides a network for trainees by promoting opportunities for professional development across different training stages. In addition, we represent the needs of trainees to the wider OHBM community, including the council and other special interest groups.
We have worked hard to organize virtual and in person career development and mentoring events for the OHBM 2022 annual meeting.
- To kick things off, our Lunch with Mentors is back in person for its 6th edition, on Monday June 20th, and will give trainees an opportunity to start networking with both early and more established career researchers in an informal setting and discuss career progression and development. This event is on the first day of the conference so it can help trainees get network and meet others early in the conference and take the ‘intimidation’ factor away from talking to more senior scientists. Stay tuned for a list of mentors (to be released soon)!
- To celebrate our return to in person conferencing, we will be hosting a Social event on Monday, June 20th at Citation Glasgow in Merchant City from 8pm till late. We hope to create a relaxed atmosphere that brings people of all career stages together for a night of socializing and fun.
- On Tuesday, June 21st, we are hosting an in-person roundtable discussion on becoming a leading investigator in human neuroscience. Everyone is invited to participate in this discussion with our speakers, the past and present OHBM Council Chairs Dr. Aina Puce and Dr. Randy Gollub (and a third speaker to be announced soon!).
- Don’t miss our symposium on Wednesday, June 22nd! We will be discussing “academia of the future”. Drs. Natasha Rajah, Inger Mewburn, and Victor Ekuta will be discussing how to navigate a remote workplace, ‘uncommon’ career paths, and how to move towards more equitable brain science and brain health.
In addition to all these in-person events, we will be hosting a number of virtual workshops on the topics of science policy and communication and how to transition from academia to industry at the end of May.
Last but not least, we are excited to host a career development workshop in Mandarin that will also take place virtually on May 27th (Beijing time 20:00, CEST 14:00, EST 08:00). Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter to get all the information about these events!
Sustainability and Environment Action (SEA) SIG
The Sustainability and Environment Action (SEA) SIG are looking forward to their second annual meeting, with activities both online and in person. Before we get to Glasgow, SEA-SIG will be working with the Executive Office to provide lots of information on how to make your 2022 OHBM experience as sustainable as possible, from train travel to hotels. At the meeting, we are excited to host our second symposium, co-organised by SEA-SIG Chair and Chair-Elect, Charlotte Rae and Winson Yang. We’ll show our recent analyses on the carbon footprint of past OHBMs, outline a vision for more sustainable meeting formats, discuss how we can minimise the footprint of big data analyses, and showcase how you can incorporate environmentally-related questions into your neuroimaging research.
There will be lots of other opportunities to talk about sustainability throughout the meeting, including a plant-based picnic in the park, for anyone who would like to chat about the climate crisis and ecological emergency. This is not just for SEA-SIG members—everyone is welcome, and there will be free vegan food! We are also organising an online social together with our sister SIGs, because SEA-SIG feels strongly that colleagues attending the annual meeting online should be able to access all aspects of the meeting experience. We also plan to facilitate ‘networking-on-the-train’ travel parties. Stay tuned for a longer blog post with SEA-SIG updates soon! You can also join our Mattermost group for SEA-SIG updates and to get involved with any of our activities, including helping us plan for Glasgow2022.
Communications Committee
By Ilona Lipp
The pre-meeting period is always ComCom’s busiest time. As with every year, we're keeping you up to date with what will happen at the Annual Meeting, such as the planned events, virtual platforms, and also interviewing the keynote speakers. This year, we're also hosting a ComCom session in Glasgow in the form of a live Neurosalience podcast hosted by Peter Bandettini. Also watch out for our upcoming Community survey, which we will use to help shape future ComCom activities. We’re looking forward to your input!
We wish all our members a great experience at the annual meeting 2022.