UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Xiaoxiao Bai, co-director of human imaging at the Social, Life and Engineering Imaging Center (SLEIC), was recently awarded the 25-26 Opportunity Grant through Penn State’s Opportunity Grant Professional Development Program. The Opportunity Grant Professional Development Program provides funding for non-tenure line teaching, clinical and professors of practice faculty for professional development through self-proposed development projects.
Bai’s proposal aims to advance neuroimaging research and education at Penn State by developing a unique multi-modal database integrating EEG (electroencephalogram), fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) data, which is currently unavailable in public repositories.
“This is an exciting opportunity for me because SLEIC recently acquired new neuroimaging equipment that significantly enhances our center’s research capabilities, but without a multi-modal neuroimaging database and pipeline for analysis of that data, we are not as effective in supporting neuroimaging research at Penn State,” said Bai. “My hope is that this project can rectify that and we’re able to expand our capabilities.”
The funding will also support standardized research pipelines using Penn State’s Institute of Computational and Data Services (ICDS)’s high-performance computing and Roar storage, where the dataset will be housed for faculty and student training.
Bai also plans to lead three workshops to train faculty and students in these systems for research, strengthening neuroimaging capabilities at Penn State. These workshops, which are expected to be held later in 2025, will focus on multi-modal data collection, processing and analysis, providing hands-on experience with the integrated database and workflows.
About SLEIC and SSRI
The Social Science Research Institute’s (SSRI) Social, Life, and Engineering Science Imaging Center (SLEIC) at Penn State provides technical support and training in neuroimaging techniques, offering guidance to undergraduate students, graduate students, professional staff, and postdoctoral researchers from 57 research labs across 19 departments in 7 colleges. This year, SLEIC acquired a new 256-channel high-density EEG system, capable of capturing high spatial-temporal brain imaging, and a 32-source by 32-detector high-end functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system, which can accommodate interactive studies by simultaneously scanning two individuals.
The Social Science Research Institute at Penn State aims to foster novel, interdisciplinary collaborations by investigators who aim to address critical human and social problems at the local, national, and international levels and to translate and disseminate this knowledge into measurable outcomes for human behavior, health, and devel