Month: September 2016

With MRI technique, brain scientists induce feelings about faces

In a new study, researchers report they were able to train unknowing volunteers to develop a mild but significant preference or dislike for faces that they had previously regarded neutrally.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Volunteers who started an experiment feeling neutral about certain faces they saw ended up unknowingly adopting the feelings that scientists induced via an MRI feedback technique, according to newly published research.

The study in PLOS Biology therefore suggests that there is a single region of the brain where both positive and negative feelings for faces take shape and provides the second demonstration this year that the MRI technique can be used to train a mental process in an unknowing subject. This spring, the team used the same method to associate the perception of color with the context of a pattern so strongly that volunteers saw the color when cued by the pattern, even if the color wasn’t really there.

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RWU’s New ‘Rising Tide’ of Educational Opportunity

With a new campus in downtown Providence and a revolutionary focus on the city’s neediest residents, RWU aims to reinvigorate the workforce – and maybe even the economy.

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PROVIDENCE – At a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday formally opening its new downtown campus, Roger Williams University showcased the school’s growing impact on the city’s social and economic fabric – from helping ex-convicts reintegrate into their communities, to delivering college credits to inner-city high school students, to keeping the lights on for poor families in medical distress.

With the inauguration of the campus at One Empire Street, Roger Williams is expanding its presence in the heart of the state to fulfill its mission of strengthening society through engaged teaching and learning. And in doing so, RWU will build the university the world needs now by opening the doors of opportunity to those who have been historically marginalized and unable to gain access to higher education, according to RWU President Donald J. Farish.

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JWU’s Providence Campus Announces College of Health & Wellness

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9/7/16 | Johnson & Wales University (JWU) continues to expand its academic programming in the area of health through the establishment of a College of Health & Wellness, located at the university’s Providence Campus.

The college is home to the new Health Science major, as well as the Master of Science program in Physician Assistant Studies that the university began offering in 2014. Future program offerings for the College of Health & Wellness include an ACEND (Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics) accredited Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Dietetics.

George Bottomley, DVM, PA-C, has been named dean of the College of Health & Wellness. In 2012, George returned to his home state of Rhode Island to join JWU as the founding director of the JWU physician assistant studies program.

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Researchers Win Grand Prize to Develop Technology to Stop Illegal Wildlife Trafficking

Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at New England Aquarium, Roger Williams University one of four winners internationally

BOSTON – The Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium and Roger Williams University won a prestigious award recently to develop technology that will help port inspectors find illegally hidden wildlife and help stem wildlife trafficking in the U.S. They are one of four grand prize winners to receive the inaugural Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge award from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Aquarium’s Michael Tlusty and Roger Williams’s Andrew Rhyne submitted their proposal to USAID’s Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge, which is funding a combined $900,000 to the Aquarium, New York University, University of Washington, and the National Whistleblower Center to design innovative science and technology solutions to combat illegal marine and terrestrial wildlife trafficking. More than 300 groups applied for the award internationally.

“We are delighted to be part of a worldwide effort to develop effective solutions to this growing and widespread problem by developing technology that can stop traffickers at the point of entering our country and causing damage, ecologically and economically,” said Tlusty, who works with Rhyne on aquaculture research and the aquarium fish trade.

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