Recent OLIV News


2024

May 2024. We're looking forward to presentations by Jesse Breedlove, Joe Emerson, and Victor Pokorny at VSS in St Pete's Beach, Florida.

2023

August 2023. Joe presented "oriSeg" at ECVP, with our surprise finding that orientation-tuned suppression effects really aren't measurable with fMRI.

June 2023. Michael-Paul and Cheryl got the pHCP 7T methods paper out the door, detailing 5+ years' of work getting data on patients, relatives, and controls at 7T.

May 2023. Karen Navarro defended their thesis and Dr. Navarro started a job as a Data Scientist at Liberty Mutual.

Feb 2023. Victor and Cheryl got the NF-ODSS behavior paper out the door, sharing our surprise finding that acuity is a good predictor of whether or not an individual with schizophrenia has aberrant surround suppression.

2022

August 2022: Joe is headed to Seattle for 2 weeks at the Allen Institute Computational Neuroscience training program.

August 2022: We wrapped up the last year of our NSF REU in Cognitive Neuroimaging. What a great group of students!

June 2022: Karen got a data science internship with Liberty Mutual!

May 2022: Jesse knocked it out of the park at the VSS Symposium, "Beyond representation and attention: Cognitive modulations of activity in visual cortex".

May 2022: Cheryl was pleased to receive the Career Readiness Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts, and even more pleased to help award the Civitas Award to Jamin McKenzie, Principal of Murray Middle School, for all of his work partnering with the University to teach our undergraduates about ways to close the opportunity gap in STEM.

2021

August 2021:

Kim and Joe had their abstracts accepted for presentation at the 2021 Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago.

July 2021:

Cheryl, Theoden Netoff, and Gordon Smith were awarded funding for their RO1 project Flexible Normalization in Ferret V1: Computational Modeling and 2-Photon Imaging by the NIH. Congratulations!

May 2021: 

We had a great lab showing at the 2021 virtual Vision Sciences Society meeting with presentations from:

April 2021: 

March 2021:

  • Karen's Brain Imaging Grant for a project titled "A Neuroimaging Investigation of Perceptual Learning as a Treatment for Amblyopia" was awarded by the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Minnesota. Congrats Karen!
2020

December 2020: 

Kim's Grant in Aid application for a project called "Investigating Characteristics of Foveal Feedback Using Ultra-High Field fMRI" was awarded by the University of Minnesota.

October 2020:

  • "Depth-dependent functional MRI responses to chromatic and achromatic stimuli throughout V1 and V2" was accepted for publication in Neuroimage! Authored by Karen Navarro, Marisa Sanchez, Steve Engel, Cheryl Olman and Kim Weldon. 
  • "Aberrant cortical connectivity during ambiguous object recognition is associated with schizophrenia" was accepted for publication in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, authored by Victor Pokorny, Tori Espensen-Sturges, Philip Burton, Scott Sponheim, and Cheryl Olman.
  • In collaboration with the Bell Museum of Natural Science, Cheryl and friends of the lab participated in the live Brain2Brain event, "How do we use MRI to understand how brains solve problems?" The event was part of a series of talks and events celebrating the premiere of the Bell Museum's new planetarium show, "Mysteries of Your Brain". For more info, head to the "Brains at the Bell" info page!

September 2020:

Joe was awarded the Minnesota ARCS Scholar Award for the academic years of 2020-2022 in the UMN Department of Neuroscience. Congratulations Joe!

July 2020:

Kim and Cheryl's paper "Forging a path mesoscopic imaging success with ultra-high field fMRI" was accepted for publication in in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B!

June 2020:

  • Joe Emerson joined the lab as a PhD student. Welcome Joe!
  • Jesse Breedlove started her postdoc with OLIV lab. Welcome Jesse! 

May 2020:

Cheryl gave at talk at the Virtual Layer fMRI Dinner event replacing the event intended for ISMRM 2020. See the talk here and details on the rest of the dinner here!

2019

October 2019:

Emily and Karen each presented posters at Neuroscience 2019, the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference in Chicago!

August 2019:

  • Emily was selected for the NIH-funded Vision Research Training Program. Congratulations Emily!
  • Karen gave a successful talk entitled "Structural Measures of Magno- and Parvocellular Projections in Visual Cortex Using Ultra-High Field fMRI" at ECVP in Belgium

June 2019: 

  • Kimberly had a successful poster presentation at OHBM in Rome!
  • Karen and Emily both had abstracts accepted to the Society for Neuroscience conference in October. Congratulations Karen and Emily!
  • Maria Linn-Evans took our Brain Zoo collection to the Frogtown Farmers' Market last week with Market Science. It was a wild success -- kids and adults loved matching up animal brain models to their species! 

April 2019: 

Events

Principal McKenzie receiving the Civitas Award
REU poster session