OHBM Blog: 2022 roundup

12/22/2022

OHBM Blog Team

Happy holidays!

Well, it’s here—the end of 2022. With OHBM’s first in-person annual meeting since before the COVID-19 pandemic, 2022 shaped up to be a busy year for the OHBM Communications Committee!

We gathered up the experiences and thoughts of this year’s OHBM blog contributors to hear how everyone’s doing and what they’re looking forward to in 2023. (For a blast from the past, here are the 2021, 2020, and 2019 posts.)

Kevin Sitek, Blog team lead and Committee chair-elect
https://sitek.github.io/
I am very thankful that 2022 brought the return of mostly normal activities for me, particularly international travel and an in-person OHBM annual meeting! It was amazing seeing so many old friends and collaborators (and meeting plenty of new ones) in Glasgow. I was also able to visit a few other cities before and after the conference, which scratched a two-plus-year travel itch. Within the Communications Committee, I shifted to more behind-the-scenes activities in 2022, but not before flipping the microphone on the podcast host and interviewing Peter Bandettini on the Neurosalience podcast. As blog team lead, I know there’s a ton of great content coming in the next year. Thanks for reading and listening along with us, and we hope to see you in 2023!

Gopi Deshpande, Blog contributor
Attending OHBM in Glasgow after a longer than expected break was really welcome. I started the year in the communications committee by proposing to write a blog about neuroimaging activities in South Asia. This was inspired by a similar piece on Latin America. I contacted 100+ researchers in the South Asian regions and have had conversations with so many people of South Asian heritage at OHBM. These conversations gave rise to the founding of the South Asian Psychology and Neuroscience Association (SAPNA) with Profs Lucina Uddin and Bharat Biswal. We are working on creating a South Asian chapter at OHBM with support from Profs Randy Gollub and Pedro Valdes Sosa. While the blog post is still in the works, I am happy that a lot of the background work needed for the blog post led to some progress on bringing these researchers into the ambit of OHBM.

Alfie Wearn, Podcast team lead and blog contributor
This has been my second year with ComCom. The summer OHBM conference was my first time meeting the group in-person, and what a lovely bunch they are. Since the summer of 2022, I have taken over the role of the podcast team lead. During this time, Neurosalience has undergone several changes, most notably with the inclusion of video podcasts on our YouTube channel. With insightful interviews continuing to be led by Peter Bandettini, and the production skills of old and new ComCom members (Anastasia Brovkin, Omer Faruk Gulban, Jeff Mentch, and Stephania Assimopoulos), we have continued to put out great content to a growing audience of brain mappers. Thanks to the help of Xiao Chen and Zhenhong He, Neurosalience episodes have even begun appearing on the Chinese podcast platform Ximalaya, with translated descriptions. I look forward to continuing my work on the podcast into 2023, and to meeting up with other brain mappers again in the summer in Montreal.

Alberto Lazari, Blog contributor
albertolazari.com
This year I shared some of my experience with pre-registration in neuroimaging on the OHBM blog. It has been incredibly rewarding to hear from people that have used my post as a guide for their own pre-registrations, and I am very thankful to the blog editors for helping with the writing process and for doing a great job at coordinating the blog content throughout the year.

The OHBM blog is a fantastic venue to share insights with the neuroimaging community, and I look forward to many new engaging posts in 2023.

Alexander Holmes, Blog contributor
This year, I interviewed Dr Helen Zhou for the OHBM 2022 Keynote Interview series. Discussing such exciting work with a brilliant researcher like Dr Zhou was truly a highlight of the year for me and I appreciate the OHBM blog team giving me the opportunity to explore this fascinating research with prominent members of the neuroimaging community. The other members of OHBM ComCom and the OHBM blog team have continued to provide an incredibly supportive environment and I’m so thankful for all of their help in editing and refining my blog content this year. I can’t wait to see what 2023 has in store for the OHBM blog!

Yohan Yee, Blog contributor and lay media team lead
yohanyee.ca
2022 has been an eventful year for me, with OHBM (and the Communications Committee in particular) playing no small part in that. Earlier in the year, as a contributor to the blog, I enjoyed working with Alfie Wearn on providing updates on what the Virtual Integration Task Force had in store for OHBM 2022. At OHBM 2022, I had the pleasure of interviewing Janaina Mourao-Miranda, a keynote speaker and brilliant researcher working on machine learning applications in psychiatry and neuroimaging (stay tuned for the upcoming post). Following the in-person conference in Glasgow, where I finally got to meet the awesome people in ComCom without being separated by a computer screen, I shared a call for new members to ComCom.
Moving forward, I am leading the lay media team within ComCom. Our goal is to bring forward the cool work happening in the brain imaging world and communicate that to the general public. With the hard work of Alejandra López Castro, Alex Albury, and Sin Kim (and the incredibly helpful chair Elizabeth DuPre and former lay-media team lead Eduardo Garza-Villarreal), I am happy to say that we have some exciting new initiatives in store. We'll provide more details on these initiatives soon, so keep an eye out for that (all the more reason to follow the blog if you haven't already done so!).

Niall Duncan, SEA-SIG liaison and blog contributor
I was happy to go home to Glasgow for the OHBM conference this year and to get the opportunity to co-author a post introducing the city to attendees. At the conference, I was fortunate to work with my colleagues from the SEA-SIG to run events highlighting the importance of environmental sustainability within our community. That’s a message we’ve also been able to communicate through the OHBM blog, something I’m looking forward to continuing doing in 2023.

Elizabeth DuPre, Committee Chair
https://elizabeth-dupre.com
As we navigated our first hybrid meeting this year, the OHBM blog provided behind-the-scenes insights into meeting planning, the people behind that work, and our shared hopes for the future.

Personally, I’ve also focused more on behind-the-scenes activities on the committee this year. While I’ve written fewer blog posts, I’ve enjoyed working on initiatives to improve how the blog – and our other Communications initiatives like the Neurosalience podcast and public outreach – can better target and inform the OHBM membership.

We have a lot of exciting new ideas planned for 2023, and I can’t wait to share them with you ! If you have any suggestions for future topics, please feel free to reach out : ohbm.comcom AT gmail.com

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