Profile
Joe Bathelt
My CV
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Education:
I did my PhD at the UCL Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children
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Qualifications:
I’ve got a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree and a Master of Science (MSc) degree
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Work History:
MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit
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Current Job:
I’m currently a post-doctoral researcher, which is a stepping stone between studying and becoming a fully-fledged independent scientist
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About Me:
I’m a cognitive neuroscience working with children. I really like brains and cats – don’t worry, I’m not a zombie
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I live in a house in Cambridge with two housemates, Jon and Steven. Jon is also a neuroscientist and Steven is a translator. When I’m not working, I like to play my guitar, read novels, or binge-watch on Netflix. My housemates and I like to watch the most awful shows together and make fun of the plot. I also enjoy playing board games with friends like Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, Munchkin, and Flux.
When I’m not lazing around, I do a fair bit of running and yoga to stay in shape and balance the long days of sitting on a desk. My proudest achievement is that I managed to stand on my head for a minute without falling over – it’s still a work in progress.
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I’m working on a project that investigates reasons why some children find school very difficult. Part of that involves doing detailed tests that can tell us about particular thinking skills that may be contributing to this. For this, we do a lot of game-like tests that help us to measure how well someone can keep things in mind for example. The ultimate goal is to identify the most important thinking skills so that children can receive the right support before they encounter any problems in school.
The brain develops considerably as children grow up. Therefore, we are also very interested to find out how brain development relates to learning and thinking skills. In order to do that, we do brain scans with the children. The youngsters lie in a big tube-like machine for us so that we can take pictures of their brain. The machine is a bit noisy, but the scans do not hurt at all and the kids are allowed to watch a movie while they are in there. A big part of my role is to make sense of these brain images and find out how brain development relates to thinking skills.
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My Typical Day:
Most days I write computer programs to make sense of brain images and on some days I do psychological tests with children.
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On a typical day, I spent most of the time on my computer either devising computer programs to make sense of brain images, writing up the results of that, reading the work of other people, or writing emails to coordinate the practicalities of research. I also attend a number of meetings to exchange ideas and plans with other researchers at my workplace and go to talks to learn about the work of people from other research centres or universities.
On some days, I do psychological tests with kids. These are game-like tests that tell us about particular thinking skills. For example, in one game I read a short story and would ask my participant to remember as much of it as possible. After a break, the participant has to tell the story again and we note down how many details he or she could remember. This tells us something about their memory. Because this test has been done with lots of children with different ages, we can compare how well someone did compared to kids of the same age.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Teach children about difficulties with keeping things in mind and what can be done about it
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
curious, creative, down-to-earth
Were you ever in trouble at school?
I got into trouble quite a bit for forgetting to do my homework
Who is your favourite singer or band?
I like a lot of music – my current favourites are Radiohead, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, and alt-J
What's your favourite food?
anything with aubergines – I love aubergines!
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
I would like to 1) have at least one cat 2) be able to eat chocolate without any harm to my health or shape 3) have unlimited money to do research
Tell us a joke.
Why did the neuron cross the street? It had action potential
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