IBACS End-of-Year Event 5/7/25

*** Details will be shared here as plans are finalized ***

Dear IBACS community,

Registration is now open for the 2025 IBACS End-Of-Year Event on Wednesday, May 7th from 9am-2pm. This celebration of the 10th anniversary of IBACS will be in-person in the Rome Ballroom on the Storrs Campus. Affiliated faculty and graduate students will give 5-minute talks on their IBACS-funded research, and we will hear brief presentations from figures in the administration. Anyone who has received IBACS support should plan to participate.

May 7 Schedule  

9:00AM – Welcome & Opening Remarks from UConn Leadership 
IBACS Directors
Inge-Marie Eigsti, Director of Research
Emily Myers, Director of Training
John Salamone, Director of Outreach and Communications
Presentation of the Phillip P. Smith Award in Cognitive Science
Gerry Altmann, Psychological Sciences
UConn Administrators
Anne D’Alleva, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Pamir Alpay, Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Ofer Harel, Dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Derek Houston, Department Head of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences
9:30AM – Data Blitz (5-minute talks) 
Natale Sciolino, Physiology and Neurobiology
Matthew Frost, UCH Neuroscience
Heather Read, Psychological Sciences (BNS)
Whit Tabor, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
Yulia Bereshpolova, Psychological Sciences (BNS)
Pengyu Zong, UCH Calhoun Cardiology Center
Jun Yan, Statistics
Hannah Mechtenberg, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
Kelly Mahaffy, Psychological Sciences (DEV)
Wesley Leong, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
10:30AM – Keynote Talks (30-minute talks)
James Li, Genetics and Genome Sciences
James Magnuson, Psychological Sciences (PAC)
11:30PM – Poster Session & Lunch
 1:30PM  – Wrap Up

Poster Session Information: The poster session will provide an opportunity for IBACS affiliates to network with the broader community. This year, we welcome project posters in addition to lab posters. We hope you will use this opportunity to highlight the research you are most excited to share with our broader community. Re-using recent conference posters or a lab poster printed for last year’s event is welcome.

Register and sign up for a poster: https://forms.office.com/r/KPtGDDn77F

Nominations for The Phillip P. Smith Award in Cognitive Science: Recognizing Vision and Innovation in the Study of Mind and Body are due on 4/1. This award will be presented at the End-of-Year Event. Please see below for the full announcement/details.

We hope you can join us! A more detailed program with talk titles will be shared at least a week before the event. Please forward this email to your lab members and share with anyone who may be interested. Thank you!

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Call for nominations: The Phillip P. Smith Award in Cognitive Science: Recognizing Vision and Innovation in the Study of Mind and Body

Phil Smith was a urologist at UConn Health during the earliest days of IBACS – his curiosity and vision led him to ask in what ways cognitive science might inform the relationship between the brain and the organs of the body whose regulation can at times be automatic and outside of conscious control, and at other times under seemingly full control of the conscious mind. Phil sadly passed away in 2022. His legacy continues through an ongoing research project across the Storrs and Farmington campuses. He brought together a band of “unusual suspects” – urologists, geriatricians, gerontologists, psychiatrists, cell biologists, and cognitive psychologists who are still working together today. In recognition of his vision, IBACS has created an award in Phil’s memory. The award consists of a crystal trophy inscribed with the recipient’s name and a design that captures Phil’s research into the relationship between brain and bladder.

IBACS seeks nominations for this year’s recipient of the Phillip P. Smith Award. Nominees can be students at any level, postdoctoral researchers, or pre-tenured faculty. Nominators should explain in what way the nominee has exhibited vision and innovation in respect of the relationship between mind and body (defining “body” to include physical aspects and systems of the body, and the “mind” to include anything that can loosely be construed as implicating cognition, emotion (and its regulation), human experience, and so on). We do not rule out any particular area or topic, so long as it is related to some aspect of psychological and bodily function (health policy, for example, that touches on such issues, the health and psychological sciences more broadly, and philosophy, as well as others, are all domains in which such vision and innovation might be expressed). A letter describing why the nominee is a worthy recipient of this award, as well as a copy of the nominee’s CV, should be sent to ibacs@uconn.edu by April 14, 2025.


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