Michael Bronstein '15

Hometown: Canton, Mass.

Major: Psychology

Extracurricular Involvement:

Active Minds
Psi Chi
Beta-Beta-Beta
Peer Tutor
Writing Center Tutor
Club Tennis

Off-Campus Experiences:

Research Assistant and Direct Care Staff, Wediko Children's Services. Summer 2013
Spring Term Abroad 2013: London Theater
Pre-clinical Research and Development Intern, Organogenesis, Inc. Summer 2012

Why did you apply for the Johnson Opportunity Grant? I applied for a Johnson Opportunity Grant because I wanted the chance to further cultivate my research skills at one of the top graduate institutions in my field of study.

How does your work under the grant apply to your studies at W&L? During my time working with Dr. Gehring's lab, I developed a greater understanding of the techniques involved in electroencephalographic (EEG) research. This newfound knowledge will be invaluable as I use it to study the effects of noise in neural systems as part of my senior honors thesis later this year.

What was the most unexpected aspect of your grant experience? I normally dislike living in cities because I miss the natural beauty and tranquility that I have become used to at W&L. I was therefore quite happy to discover the many untouched spaces in Ann Arbor (check out the Nichols Arboretum!) and soon found myself enjoying living there more than I ever expected I would.

Post-Graduation Plans: I intend to attend a graduate program in clinical psychology.

What professor has inspired you? I am grateful to Professor Lorig (psychology/neuroscience) for inspiring me to view the milestones of my academic experience as guideposts to a greater understanding of my field rather than as finish lines. This viewpoint has cultivated my love of research and allowed me to get the most out of my undergraduate career.

My summer research experience involved government funding and a soundproof chamber in an underground room. Despite these spy-movie trappings, the products of the experiments that I helped conduct won't be used by a secret agent in an action movie. Instead, the people who are most likely to use the knowledge that I assisted in generating are clinical psychologists and researchers with an interest in how people realize that they have made a mistake.

I spent almost two months working with Dr. Bill Gehring at the University of Michigan this summer, helping to study error-related negativity (ERN), a component of brain activity which is elicited when a person makes a response other than a correct one in many types of tasks. When I first arrived at the University of Michigan, I was excited that I would finally get to spend a summer using the neuroimaging techniques that I had learned to love during my previous three years at Washington and Lee. I was also determined to learn something new every day of my internship experience.

I quickly found that this determination was matched by my fellow lab members. We spent much of our first week in Michigan attending a "boot camp" style course on how to conduct event-related potential (ERP) research, a type of neuroimaging research used to study brain activity components. I never thought I would find the term "boot camp" an appropriate description for a lecture series, but by the end of this eight-hour per day course it had certainly earned the title both by its rigor and by the amount that I gained from it. After three days of digesting what I had been taught, I got to apply everything I had learned by assisting in the processing of some neuroimaging data that Dr. Gehring's lab had collected recently. Processing a set of data basically includes sorting it into groups called bins based on how the brain activity that one collected was elicited, removing artifacts from it, and finally averaging these sorted data together in order to see differences between bins and test one's hypotheses. Learning to process neuroimaging data was an empowering experience for me because it vastly increased my ability to be self-sufficient as a researcher.

Over the next several weeks, I continued to process these data and also helped to collect new information for the lab as part of a study comparing the brain activity of various clinical populations to that of healthy controls. Getting to see neuroimaging techniques being used to improve our understanding of psychopathology was my favorite part of my internship because that is exactly what I want to do in my future career. If you were curious, this data collection is where the soundproof room came in; it helps research participants to pay attention to the tasks that we have them complete during experiments, which in turn lets the lab collect better quality data.

When I was not running experiments or processing data, I had the chance to explore Ann Arbor. This exploration lead to several learning experiences which I never imagined that I would have during my internship. Some of these learning experiences gained me practical knowledge, such as the fact that the length of one's walk to work in a city is positively correlated with one's likelihood of running into a street team handing out free food from a local restaurant. Others of these learning experiences helped further the liberal arts education I had gained thus far at Washington and Lee. For example, I learned more about fine art by talking to the artists at Ann Arbor's famous art fare (which closes the downtown area of the city for a week each summer) about their work.

Before I knew it, my time with Dr. Gehring's lab was coming to a close. Although I was sad to leave, I was excited because I was going to spend my last two weeks in Ann Arbor learning to do fMRI (a neuroimaging technique which uses changes in blood flow to estimate where changes in brain activity occur) research in a training course offered by the university's graduate program. By the end of my summer in Michigan, I knew that I my Johnson Opportunity Grant experience had left me better prepared for graduate school and for my future career. I cannot wait to apply what I have learned this summer to my own research at Washington and Lee.