Undergraduate student researcher Ray Fang was awarded summer research funding from Biological Sciences Summer Internship Program (BioSIP) and undergraduate student researcher Rebecca Shannon was awarded the Human Ecology Summer Research Stipend.

Work with Christiane Linster and Thomas Cleland of the Computational Physiology Laboratory was recently featured in a Cornell Research article. The collaboration is exploring how physical and behavioral situations influence contextually dependent olfactory decision-making tasks. Read the full article here: Cornell Research – Smell and Situation, Entangled in Our Brains.

Undergraduate student Ben Lederman was awarded a 2021 Summer Experience Grant to conduct research in the David Smith lab this summer.

For more information on this award, see:
https://as.cornell.edu/careers/summer-experience-grant-funding#about-summer-experience-grants-

Undergraduate students Sabrina Giaimo and Alexandra Hodder were awarded the 2021 Halpern and Rosevear Undergraduate Summer Research Award to conduct research in the David Smith lab this summer. The funding for this award is generously provided by the Halpern and Rosevear families.

More information on the award may be found here: https://psychology.cornell.edu/department-awards-undergraduates

David Smith was honored with the Morgan Chia-Wen Sze and Bobbi Josephine Hernandez Distinguished Teaching Prize. The prize recognizes Cornell professorial faculty for excellence in teaching from the following disciplines: humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences and mathematics.

More information on the award can be found here: https://as.cornell.edu/about/sze-hernandez-teaching-prize

Zichen (Cleo) He presented a poster titled “Different Mechanisms of Context Encoding in the Hippocampus and Retrosplenial Cortex” at the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board (CURB) 2021 Spring Symposium. Cleo has been working with graduate student  Dev Subramanian to better understand the different mechanisms to encode contextual information in two interconnected brain regions. They have been using computational methods to analyze the various neuron firing patterns to understand the advantages of different coding scheme.

More information can be found at the Cornell 2021 Spring Symposium website: https://www.cornellcurb.com/spring-symposium

Undergraduate student researcher Kimaya Raje successfully defended her honors thesis titled, “The Role of the Ventral Hippocampus and the Anterior Olfactory Nucleus in Context and Olfactory Integration”. Congratulations Kimaya!

Undergraduate student researcher Eunice Yiu successfully defended her honors thesis titled, “The Relationship between Spatial Occupancy Time and Firing Patterns of Hippocampal CA1 Neurons in Response to Changes in the Social Context”. Congratulations on the excellent work Eunice!

Wendy will be starting at Cornell and joining the David Smith lab in the Fall 2020. She is coming from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was an Undergraduate Research Assistant in the Rhodes Laboratory.

New paper with Gregory Peters is now online in the Behavioral Neuroscience journal.

Peters, G. J., & Smith, D. M. (2020). The medial prefrontal cortex is needed for resolving interference even when there are no changes in task rules and strategies. Behavioral Neuroscience, 134(1), 15-20. https://doi.org/10.1037/bne0000347