Emory Report homepage  

March 30, 2009
Soundbites

fMRI opens new world to research
Researchers who want to tap Emory’s growing facilities for functional magnetic resonance imaging need to consider the costs, said Chris May, senior research specialist in psychology, during a recent seminar sponsored by the Center for Mind, Brain and Culture. Using fMRI costs $500 per hour, said May, who can assist faculty with experiments to study and map brain activity.

Preliminary data is usually required before getting funding for using fMRI, said Patricia Bauer, senior associate dean of research. “You want to come to imaging techniques with a well-worked out question,” she said. “You need to show that you can do the work, and that you are likely to get interesting data.”

Emory’s IBIS funding program is one source for faculty seeking funds to get started using fMRI, Bauer said.
—Carol Clark

Eyes and ears on a troubled time
“Much has been written about World War II and the Holocaust from the Jewish perspective. Very little is written from the perspective of a non-Jewish child,” noted Emeritus Professor Eycke Strickland.

She put that perspective into action at a recent reading of her autobiographical “Eyes are Watching, Ears are Listening: Growing up in Nazi Germany 1933–1946.”

“My parents opposed Hitler’s fascist regime and when the dark shadow of Nazi brutality began to touch our lives, they tried to shield my siblings and me,” she read.

Strickland’s father, honored in post-war years by both the German and Israeli governments, tried to protect his family by keeping from them his efforts to protect and shield Jews. —Leslie King

Exploitation more math than politics
“Corruption is not just expropriation of financial resources, but also expropriation of natural resources,” said Medha Patkar, environmentalist and human rights activist, at the South Asian Studies Program’s Annual Sheth Endowed Lecture in Indian Studies.

She beckoned the international community to pay attention to the “onslaught” of agricultural communities internationally who are exploited due to privatization and large corporations; a process which she says “is more arithmetic than politics.”

Patkar has been leading the protest against the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project in India, which would lead to the destruction of many local villages. Instead, Patkar advocates alternative development paradigms, ones that are democratic and involve the people. —Alia Hassanali