2023: Taking stock; and looking forward to 2024!

source: https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/setting-goals-for-the-new-year


All considered, 2023 was a productive year for the lab. We submitted several grant proposals (unsuccessfully so far, but I count submissions as a success), a couple of conference papers, one review paper for a journal, and brought a preregistration to 90% completion (expecting to register the document in Jan 2024). Some of these should be published in 2024. 

We hired some talented and motivated RAs, one of whom went on to convert to our MS by research program. 2/4 students who sat for placements have gotten their dream job offers. I'm sure the other two will also land something good within the next several months. This is also a positive outcome given how tough this placement season was across the country. One of the offers was a PPO and the work done by the student at his internship was based on the research he is doing with us. For prospective students reading this, this is a good example of how undergraduate research experience can help even if your career goal is to get a position in the industry. The lab also had a strong showing at ACCS10 at IIT Kanpur with two posters and an oral presentation, though I myself couldn't attend.  

We look forward to an even better 2024. I will start as Associate Editor at Psychological Science in January 2024, which will be a good learning experience. I have some prior experience editing for PCI:RR and writing editorial recommendations. I hope to learn how to be a better editor by continuing to volunteer for PCI:RR and over the course of the new gig at Psychological Science. 

We will complete the preregistration mentioned earlier, then collect data for it next semester, and submit the paper to a good journal before the summer. The other big ticket item on my list is to complete the revisions for my main postdoc paper and have that published finally and move on to the second postdoc paper in collaboration with another postdoc at the NIH. I am also looking forward to submitting another journal paper from the lab on a topic quite far removed from human memory, testing predictions from an ethological framework for explaining emotion perception. This is work that I had started with David Huron at OSU back in 2012. I picked it back up with an MS by research student in the lab, the project now also includes a collaboration with my computer vision colleagues at IIITH to add some interesting modeling aspects to test our hypotheses in both humans and machines. We also have a few other extended conference papers in the pipeline that we expect to submit in 2024. 

Spring 2024 is a busy teaching semester for me with two courses, one co-taught course on statistical methods and the other one a new course based on Mike X Cohen's book on neural time series analysis. With this new course, I will now be teaching 3 courses per year and helping with organizing the seminar and other academic activities for the center (e.g. a summer orientation week for new research students in cogsci). 

We are hoping to recruit a motivated PhD student in 2024. We are especially interested in people with computational and coding chops with demonstrated interest (e.g. through course work, undergrad projects, etc) in cognitive science. We are also looking to work with a few new dual degree students as 2-3 DD students are expected to graduate this year from the lab. So, get in touch if you'd like to join us on this ride! 

Finally, in 2024, my friends from IIITH and I plan more frequent jam sessions and socializing. Having strong social bonds is essential for managing stress but more importantly, it is important to work hard but also to play hard. I also have personal fitness goals to attain in 2024 after having met my goals in 2023. I have tried to inspire friends and family to take up fitness seriously after experiencing the benefits of prioritizing my health in 2023. So, here's to an even better 2024 for everyone! 


  


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