Category Archives: news

The Supreme Court has just ruled that life-without-parole sentencing for juveniles is unconstitutional, relying in part on evidence regarding the protracted timecourse of brain maturation. Over the last few years, a number of researchers, including Professor Bunge, co-wrote amicus briefs and testified in state State senate hearings that led up to this decision. The researchers took care to provide a balanced overview of extant research on brain development.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1455875-pistas-sobre-como-aprende-el-cerebro

At Humboldt University in Berlin, at Yana Fandakova’s thesis defense. Yana, who graduated summa cum laude, is wearing a neat personalized graduation cap with lots of photos on it. Behind her from left to right: a Humboldt reseearcher, Silvia, Yee Lee Shing, Hauke Heekeren, Ulman Lindenberger, and Peter Frensch.

Thanks to the fundraising efforts of Jack Shonkhoff, Director of the Frontiers of Innovation, our lab has received philanthropic funding for a “Proposal to Advance the Frontiers of Innovation in Early Childhood Policy and Practice” in Washington State.

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/activities/frontiers_of_innovation/

Change is in the air.

Today our 5th-year Neuroscience student Allyson Mackey gives her public Ph.D. thesis talk, titled “Reasoning training alters brain structure and function”. This fall she will head to Prof. John Gabrieli’s lab at MIT for a postdoc.

Kirstie Whitaker, also a 5th-year Neuroscience student, will be giving her thesis talk on August 17th, and then headed back to the U.K. for a postdoc.

Maia Barrow is coming on board on June 1st as a new full-time research assistant in the lab, followed by Belén Guerra, an incoming graduate student in Psychology.

Celebrating the lab’s 1-year anniversary, back in 2004 at UC Davis! From the left, Carter Wendelken (now our senior research scientist), Jesse Edelstein (grad student at UC Merced), Eveline Crone (full professor in the Netherlands), Ryan Honomichl (professor at a liberal arts college in Ohio), Sarah Donohue (currently at Duke and gearing up for a postdoc in Germany), and Mike Souza (professor at the University of British Columbia). We will have to do something big next summer for our 10th anniversary. Even bigger than the surprise chocolate cake below…

Can You Make Yourself Smarter_ – NYTimes

One of our undergrad research assistants, Forrest Riege, is a budding jazz musician. His group, named “Frank Martin’s Advanced Combo”, has played twice at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley over the last few months. Silvia is a big fan of their work… and hopes that Forrest will remember the lab when he becomes famous.

This article in Forbes was inspired in part by as-yet-unpublished data from our lab on the neural changes associated with 3 months of reasoning training, spearheaded by senior grad student Allyson Mackey. Allyson, Alison, and Kirstie are all hard at work writing up exciting findings from this project.

New brain imaging technology may pave the way for a new science to understand how children think and learn. It could eventually help educators and revolutionize classrooms.

Click here for the article.