Research
My overarching goal is to bring my background as a diaspora-loving Black woman into the intellectual spaces of neuroscience and engineering to create scholarship that addresses the issues affecting my communities.
Post-Grad Work
American Epilespy Society
“Clinical Evaluation of Sevo Systems: Equitable EEG for Coarse, Curly Hair”
EEG electrodes for Coarse, Curly Hair
My team’s pitch for the Pittsburgh Innovation Challenge (PinCh) competition! (#StanArnelleEtienne)
Pandemic / PhD Work
Below is a link to my defense talk and acknowledgments!
Top-Down Attention in Auditory and Visual Contexts
Above is my (virtual) poster presentation for the Advances and Perspectives in Auditory Neuroscience (APAN) annual meeting in October 2020. I was selected for a teaser talk. See the full poster here.
Auditory Selective attention in adhd
I study auditory “selective attention”, which is the ability to listen to one sound (for instance, a teacher) among many other sounds (like a loud, overcrowded classroom). I study this ability in young adults with ADHD. Here is a scientific poster showing my most recent findings on this line of work using electroencephalography (EEG). Stay tuned for more!
Visual Selective Attention in the general population
In my first project as a rotation student, we compared brain responses to visual scene complexity in a selective attention task. We found that overcrowding in the visual scene reduces neural responses using EEG
Alpha Oscillation Extraction Techniques
While investigating working on an individual difference project, I wondered if the signal processing approach would greatly influence my ability to extract meaningful individual differences in alpha oscillation power. This led me to do a simulation study, using a forward model of EEG. I found that for my data, the alpha extraction pipeline was not influencing my results. Null results are still useful!
Non-Academic Side Projects
my interactive brain
Click through for a 3D rendering of MY brain’s cortical surface. The cortex is the outermost layer of the brain, and it’s where we think most cognition happens. I got this model from a friend (Tom Morin, who has some AMAZING brain visualizations on his own site) who imaged my brain with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Click through and have some fun judging me by the shape of my sulci :)
Using Machine Learning to predict social movement success
I’m at Carnegie Mellon, so I figured I’d learn some Machine Learning techniques in Summer 2019. This is the result of a group project I completed for a Statistical Learning mini-course (5 days). Our job was to determine which ML algorithm best predicted the success of social movements from a historical dataset with cross-validation.
educational data mining for CHinese syllable learning
I participated in CMU’s LearnLab in summer 2019, a weeklong course that trains data scientists to explore education technologies. I was on the Educational Data Mining track and did a project about English speakers learning Chinese tones using an automated online tutor. My results were pretty interesting. Below is a link to the poster (imagine it printed on regular letter paper then tessellated).
Teaching as research project: Concept Integration in a Studio Format of Signals and Systems
I did a Teaching As Research (TaR) project through BU’s Center for Teaching & Learning and the NSF Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) network in 2016. I was TA for Signals & Systems (BE 401) which was taught in a flipped classroom format where students watched lectures online and during class time worked collaboratively on problems in a “studio”. I was eager to use the Signals and Systems Concept inventory, a conceptual test, to track student learning and implemented a project on the effect of using “concept maps” to track the interrelatedness of different concepts in the course.
Undergraduate Projects
Peripheral nerve tissue engineering
I did my undergraduate research in peripheral nerve tissue engineering. My role was to elucidate the differentiation and viability of Schwann cells, the myelin sheath around peripheral nerves, during various co-culturing conditions (with fibroblasts) and with various neurotrophic factors (nerve growth factor, glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor). Our group published this article in 2014.
Brain-Computer INterface for limited hand/motor control
In undergrad I worked on a brain-computer interface team and we created a fun e-book reader. We got to go to the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (Neural Engineering) in 2013. I know it’s ancient news, but I still think it’s fun.