The prize money for winning the Brain Zone (March 2010) went towards attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.  This is a massive meeting where 30,000 neuroscientists from all over the world get together to share their research and discuss new developments and ideas.  My PhD student, Keith Duncan, gave a talk entitled “Chronometric TMS shows hemispheric asymmetries in the time course of ventral occipito-temporal processing consistent for both visual words and objects.”  Needless to say, the title alone brought the audience in droves and the feedback was great. 

In fact, the whole process helped to land Keith a new position when he finished his PhD in September and he is now doing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the prestigious Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (London).  So in addition to help publicizing some of our most recent work, the award directly contributed to furthering Keith’s academic career and to top it off, he’s applied to be in the next I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here! where hopefully he can keep up the grand tradition!