Lab Life
2022 – The year of the brains
2022 was the year when we started acquiring large scale fMRI data sets. As scanning calendars were filling up in Berlin as pandemic restrictions were reduced, we moved scanning operations to the CCNB at FU Berlin. Due to the restless effort of PhD and Master’s students we acquired more than 200 hours of task-based high resolution multiband fMRI data and over 300 hours of behavioral data. We all learned a lot about how to acquire data efficiently and how to make sense of these data sets. We also got to spent a few days by the lake, because in the middle of this, you need to spend some days by the lake. Christmas time brought chocolate and plans for hitting next year’s conference rotation with our exciting data.
2021 – The distributed cognition and memory group starts operations
We started off our lab in January 2021. This was a difficult year to start a new chapter in one’s life with a majority of the year spent in home office. In this year, we all learned a lot about how to run behavioral experiments online and we have started our first imaging experiments. We also learned a lot about how to be a lab and how many cat memes we need in our lives (a lot!). Finally, we learned to do the paperwork necessary for all this, but we still have some improvement to do on this end.
2020 – Let there be grant
I got the news that I had funding for my own research group in spring 2020 a few weeks after the first pandemic wave hit Europe. I got help from a lot of people at the start of this group and the lab wouldn’t be what it is today without that help. While this is not the place for exhaustive thanks I am contractually obligated (by David Wisniewski) to share this first draft for a lab logo by Martin Hebart.