Nikol Piskuric of the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour has been selected as a 2019 winner of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance award for teaching excellence.  This award is granted to educators who excel at unlocking the potential of Ontario’s young people.

Reuven Dukas of the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Exemplar Career Award from the Animal Behavior Society.  This award is granted to a researcher who has made a major long-term contribution to the study of animal behavior.

On May 24-25, 2019, high school students from across Canada came to McMaster University to compete for the CIHR Canadian National Brain Bee championship. This competition tests knowledge of neuroscience and skills at patient diagnosis and neuroanatomy.  Competitors represented local brain bees from across Canada: Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London, Waterloo, Guelph, Hamilton, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, and Newfoundland. The winner of this year's competition is Jenny Sun from the Edmonton Brain Bee. Congratulations Jenny!  Jenny will represent Canada at the International Brain Bee in September in Daegu, South Korea. 

 
Link:  https://brainbee.ca

 

Researchers from PNB have found a way to measure the communication of emotion among musicians by analyzing their movements in detail. They have shown that communication in body sway is key to achieving a common emotion expression. Observing performances by the Gryphon Trio, an acclaimed chamber music ensemble, researchers fitted each performer with motion capture markers to track their movements while the musicians played happy or sad musical excerpts, once with musical expression, once without.

“Successfully performing music with a group is a highly complex endeavor,” explains Laurel Trainor, the senior author on the study and director of the LIVELab where the work was conducted.
The findings were published in the journal, Scientific Reports.

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