Author Archives: sbunge

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This article in Forbes was inspired in part by as-yet-unpublished data from our lab on the neural changes associated with 3 months of reasoning training, spearheaded by senior grad student Allyson Mackey.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.

This week, Silvia will give a talk in Buenos Aires and then head to Patagonia to participate in the 2nd Latin American School for Education, Neural and Cognitive Sciences, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. For announcements about future meetings, check the School’s website.

What makes this trip even more special is that Silvia’s family is from Argentina. This will be her first visit in 17 years. On top of that, the site of this year’s School is hard to beat…

First-year grad student Chloe Green has been accepted as a fellow in the Research in Cognition and Mathematics Education program at UC Berkeley. This program will cover her tuition and stipend for the next 2-3 years. Congrats, Chloe!

Frontiers, an online publisher, will be publishing an E-book on the Developing Human Brain. Here is the introduction: PDF

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Silvia Bunge are thrilled to announce the publication of a special issue of the new journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, focused on the intersection between neuroscience and education. The papers will be open access for one year, thanks to a donation from the Dana Foundation.

PDF of the introduction to the special issue 

Click here and scroll down to to access the full Special Issue on Neuroscience and Education.