The Foundation has specific strategies on decisions about where funding can make an impact. The grants are long term investments that work on finding solutions to hard problems. The MacArthur Foundation is working with the Mozilla Foundation to create a badge system to represent all of the learning students do. The badges represent learning that is useful for jobs or that are connected to careers. Degrees do not show everything a person is capable of. I am a psychology major but I am interested in working in marketing or advertising once I graduate. Being a psych major allows me to bring a different perspective to my marketing classes. If someone only looked at my degree they would not know all of the skills I have because of marketing classes.
Danielle Bassett, a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, from Philadelphia, PA is a physicist working on increasing our understanding of the human brain. Bassett analyzes the interactions of neurons in different parts of the brain when a person performs a certain activity. She uses brain imaging of people completing a motor task. Bassett has found that a person's ability to learn can be predicted based on the brain's flexibility. Bassett is creating new insights on learning, disease diagnosis, therapies and treatment for brain injury. Hopefully Bassett's discoveries will to benefit people with diseases and and disorders.
Danielle Bassett, a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, from Philadelphia, PA is a physicist working on increasing our understanding of the human brain. Bassett analyzes the interactions of neurons in different parts of the brain when a person performs a certain activity. She uses brain imaging of people completing a motor task. Bassett has found that a person's ability to learn can be predicted based on the brain's flexibility. Bassett is creating new insights on learning, disease diagnosis, therapies and treatment for brain injury. Hopefully Bassett's discoveries will to benefit people with diseases and and disorders.
The recipient of the MacArthur genius grant you wrote about sounds really interesting. I didn't know a physicist could be so involved in neurology. I recently wrote on my blog post about a Neurologist working on stem cell research. I feel like this kind of medical research for both recipients takes a high level of intelligence and creativity. It is very innovative they way these two different women are approaching research on the brain. Yet, they are both conducting research in very different ways.
ReplyDeleteBiophysics is an awesome field! Seems like physicist have their hands in everything these days :) Perhaps you can be more creative with more viewpoints to draw upon?
ReplyDelete