Members of the Cohen Lab recently participated in the 10^th annual STEAM Career Showcase for Students with Disabilities at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, NC. Students had the opportunity to learn about the brain, play brain trivia, and make brain hats and pipe-cleaner neurons!

Earlier this month, members of the Cohen Lab attended the Flux 2022 conference in Paris, France! This was the first in-person Flux conference in two years. Congrats to Sikoya Ashburn, Arianna Cascone, Mackenzie Mitchell, Tehila Nugiel, and Mac Woodburn on your impressive talks and poster presentations!

Our undergraduate research assistant Erika successfully defended her honors thesis over Zoom at the beginning of this month! The title of her thesis was “Connectivity between emotion regulation brain regions in children with ADHD.” We are proud of her and excited to see what she does after graduating!

Arianna Cascone wins Best Graduate Student Poster at the annual Triangle Society for Neuroscience meeting for her work assessing functional network organization in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). PD is characterized by a range of motor and non-motor symptoms, including cognitive decline.Using resting-state fMRI data collected from individuals with PD with and without cognitive decline, we examined whether topological brain-network resilience contributes to protection against cognitive decline in PD. Relative to individuals with PD experiencing cognitive decline, the frontoparietal network in cognitively stable individuals with PD is significantly more resilient to network perturbation. The topological robustness of the frontoparietal network may contribute to protection against cognitive decline in individuals with PD.

Congratulations Arianna!

Dr. Sikoya Ashburn, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, was named as a Rising Star on Cell Mentor’s list of 1,000 Inspiring Black Scientists in the U.S.! You can see the complete list here: https://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/1000-inspiring-black-scientists-in-america. Congratulations, Sikoya!

The Cohen Lab attended Flux Virtual Congress 2020 from September 9th to September 12th. We are honored to continue learning about the most recent advancements and research in developmental cognitive neuroscience, and to contribute to this community by presenting and discussing our own research. Click here if you are interested in checking out our recorded poster presentations on Youtube!

• Dr. Nicholas Fogleman: Neural correlates underlying irritability and emotion dysregulation in children with and without ADHD.
• Dr. Teague Henry: The effects of methylphenidate on the functional controllability of the brain in children with ADHD.
• Mac Woodburn: Reconfiguration of functional brain networks from resting-state to task during childhood is associated with motor learning and working memory.
• Mackenzie Mitchell: Rewards drive reconfiguration of whole brain networks in children.
• Cleanthis Michael: Disrupted brain network reconfiguration between resting and cognitive control task states across changing cognitive demands in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
• Cheyenne Bricken: Brain network organization and cognitive performance during childhood.

Darius presented his poster at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students and won an award for having one of the best posters in the social sciences/public health category. Great job, Darius!

The Cohen Lab at UNC’s Brain Academy! Mackenzie helped start off the day with some science about the brain, while Cheyenne and Cleanthis showed off the EEG and mock MRI scanner. It was great to get underrepresented teens involved in and excited about psychology and neuroscience!

[Top Left: Kelly Eom with her poster, entitled “Effects of methylphenidate on response control and intrinsic whole-brain functional network organization in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder”

Top Right: Cheyenne Bricken with her poster, entitled “Longitudinal trajectories of cortical thickness from birth to 6 years predict cognitive outcomes at 9 years”

Bottom Left: Mackenzie Woodburn with his poster, entitled “Trajectories of group and individual-level structural brain network organization from birth to childhood and their cognitive relevance”

Bottom Right: Kelly Duffy’s poster, entitled “Intrinsic Functional Network Organization and Failures of Response Control in Children with ADHD”]

From August 30th to September 1st, members of the Cohen Lab visited New York City for Flux 2019! There, they attended presentations, viewed posters, and learned about ongoing research within the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Additionally, Kelly Eom, Cheyenne Bricken, and Mac Woodburn presented posters for our Brain Organization in ADHD and Longitudinal Pediatric Brain Development studies. Great job, everyone!