Researchers of Emory

Xinyue Tong  was awarded a Spring 2016 Conference Grant to present at the Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy. Presenting my philosophy paper “Beyond Kindness and Malice” at Eastern Michigan University (EMU)’s 6 th Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy has been an unforgettable experience and a fond memory. I not only received instructive feedback from my commenter, but also learned from my fellow presenters. Moreover, attending other presentations and conducting further discussions enabled me to learn new perspectives of philosophy.

Ethan Morris is a recent graduate who majored in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2016 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on human recognition under Dr. Daniel Dilks. My name is Ethan Morris, and I am a senior at Emory University, studying Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. I am a member of the Dilks Lab , researching how humans recognize faces and places. We can recognize a person or a place within a fraction of a second, even if we have never seen that particular person or place before. How do we accomplish such a remarkable feat? One promising strategy for attempting to understand how we recognize faces and places is to understand the neural systems that accomplish it. The human cortex contains regions that are specialized for processing faces and independent regions that are specialized for processing places.

Xiancong Zhang  is a rising senior majoring in Chemistry and Biology. He was awarded a Spring 2016 Conference Grant which he used to present at the Experimental Biology Conference in Chicago.   I went to Experimental Biology (EB) in Chicago from 4.22-4.25 as an undergraduate poster presenter. EB is an annual international meeting of six societies, focusing on the latest research progress and cross-communication between disciplines. According to its website, it is a “multidisciplinary, scientific meeting features plenary and award lectures, workshops, oral and poster presentations, on-site career services and exhibits spotlighting equipment, supplies and publications required for research labs and experimental study.”

Alex Liu  is a rising senior majoring in Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2016 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on scene processing in the brain under Dr. Daniel Dilks. Research is the process of looking for something that evidence and theory support, but its existence has yet to be seen. Not only is this is the foundation of why we do research but it is also the reason why research is so hard. In my current research, we believe that the brain has more specialized regions for scene processing than what current research has shown us.  Instead of there being one stream for scene processing, we propose that there are actually two: one for navigation and one for categorization.  The philosophy behind a two-stream system for scene processing comes from the fact that we can categorize without navigating; however, we cannot navigate through a scene without categorizing what is in it. An example would be trying to walk through a cluttered room. If we want to get to the othe