Intended Audience
The neuroscience program welcomes Dr. Ariana Gard as the first speaker in its 2023-2024 seminar series.
Structural and functional neuroimaging have become common tools to study human behavior and cognition. Efforts to increase the generalizability of neuroscience research largely focus on increasing sample size, with less explicit attention to population representation. In this talk, Dr. Gard will describe a Population Neuroscience approach to human neuroimaging research, and present empirical data that evaluates the sociodemographic representation of over 1,000 recently-published neuroimaging studies. In addition, she will describe the Representation And Research Ethics (RARE) Project at the University of Maryland, College Park, which aims to increase population representation in biosocial research through community-driven research methods.
Dr. Ariana Gard is an assistant professor of developmental psychology, affiliate in the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience (NACS), Social Data Science Center, and the Maryland Population Research Center, and director of the Growth And Resilience across Development (GARD) Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. Together with her students and collaborators, she studies how environmental adversity and promotive factors shape children’s brain and behavioral development – with a particular focus on how features of the neighborhood context and the parent-child relationship guide risk and resilience processes. A prominent feature of her work is to increase sociodemographic diversity in neurobiological research by including historically under-represented groups in research design and implementation.
Free and open to the public.
This event may be used to satisfy the Lecture Reflection Requirement in PSYC206 and PSYC493/494.