It is not always easy to find female role models, which is one of the reasons why I volunteer for ‘Spiegelbeeld’, a Dutch initiative to show female highschool students that maths, physics and all exact sciences in general are highly interesting (i.e. not dull or boring at all), are applied in more practical areas than they can think of (even in hospitals) and not just for boys who score super grades. Another way to find female role models is to check out the website of a media organisation called ‘No Country for Young Women’ that highlights female role models in science, engineering and IT, worldwide. So far, most role models are American, but a few Dutch role models have been added in the past couple of months, such as Emily Jacometti, Commercial Director & Co-founder at Flavour in Amsterdam and Karin Sluis, a civil engineer working as director Spatial development and mobility with Witteveen+Bos Consulting engineers in Deventer. A website to check out regularly and mention to your female (and male) students!
I am a bit late to report it but here it is: researchers from Berkeley, Minnesota and Oxford have developed a new ultrafast EPI sequence for fMRI that brings down the repetition time (TR) to only 400 ms at 3T. Their finding was published in the 20 dec 2010 issue of PLoS one. This is exciting news: not only does it mean that faster processes in the brain can be followed than with conventional EPI, it also allows more full brain scans to be collected within a single scan session. Especially in the patients and healthy elderly subjects that I include for my own research, I am always careful not to extend total scanning time beyond one hour. Normally I use TRs of 2 seconds. With this advancement I would get five times the data in the same amount of scanning time! Or, the same amount of data in only one fifth of the time, which would hugely decrease the burden for subjects. This development also seems very interesting from the perspective of concurrent EEG-fMRI recording: even though the gap in temporal resolution is still very large, the two are getting closer together with this finding.