Jin Bo is working in Jane Clark's Lab
Why did I choose NACS as my graduate training program?
When I was looking for a doctoral program, I was getting my master’s degree in Kinesiology. My research projects focused on visuomotor coordination and adaptation in children with typical development. Soon there were some questions concerning: what are the relationships between behavioral findings and brain function? How can we evaluate ‘normal’ or ‘delayed’ population? How can we relate certain behavioral differences to clinical populations? These questions accompanied me since I was a medical student in China. I saw kids with very high IQ score having trouble in school. I saw parents anxiously looking for places to get help because their kid was not acting like others in some way… After I got my medical degree in Pediatrics and worked for 7 years directly and indirectly with children, I thought that there must be something that we could do except just prescribing medicine. My master’s training program gave me a good chance to understand the principles of visuomotor coordination in typically developing children. So, my goal for selected doctoral training program is to expand on what I have learned about certain brain functions to atypical motor behavior as well as applications in clinical population. NACS is an excellent graduate training program matching my interest in this field. If you are looking for an inter-discipline graduate program, which gives you chances to expose both research and clinical experiences, you have come to the right place!
How do I feel so far in the program?
I think that I found the right place not just because of free pizza each week. Throughout the year, distinguished speakers from many departments at the University of Maryland as well as other institutions, invited for our journal club every Friday noon present their work and share their ideas and opinions in their lectures and meetings with students. Since NACS is an interdisciplinary program drawing from many other departments, the annual NACS fest give us chance to listen to the work from other graduate students in computer science, biology, engineering, education, kinesiology, psychology etc. These experiences have been enormously helpful in learning about questions/fields other than my own, which also opens my mind for thinking/combining my own questions and interests.
But I won’t lie to you, graduate study is also a hard work. In the first year, the initial committee member meeting are setup to allow you raise your issues and concerns and get feedback from other faculty members, as well as your fellow NACS students. In the second year, the second committee member meeting helps you to evaluate your study progress and plan. I think these meetings are very helpful for me to find out how I was doing in the previous year, and to plan what I should do in the upcoming year. They also give you an environment to communicate with others and get feedback quickly so that you would not feel isolated and helpless, which sometimes inevitably happens.
What are my current research projects?
My first line of projects was to focus on gradual versus sudden adaptation during visuomotor distortion in typically developing children together with my advisors Dr. Clark and Dr. Contreras-Vidal. This project serves as a background developmental study for our core research on children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). Children with DCD are characterized by poor performance in daily activities which require coordination, with the impairment not due to specific medical conditions such as cerebral palsy or mental retardation. Another important criterion of this disorder is that it interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living. We want to examine whether children with DCD between the ages of 6 and 7 years are able to perform the same tasks at their comparable age level? If you are interested in finding out our current status, you can visit our website at http://www.hhp.umd.edu/KNES/faculty/jclark/research/CurrentDCD.htm
My second line of project is focus on the timing function in cerebellum. Dr. Clark has introduced me to an excellent opportunity to work with Dr. Bastian at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, Johns Hopkins University. I really feel fortunate that I get these chances to work with different clinical populations in these top research places.
Now, I am in my third year studying as a NACS student. I start to work on my dissertation proposal. My previous experiences as well as excellent courses in NACS will give me solid foundation for my future work.
