This episode features archaeology PhD student, Vera Haponava and her advisor Dr. Catriona Pickard, a senior lecturer at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Edinburgh University.
We explored in detail of how they carefully curate samples from relics for the stable isotope analysis. The real world politics and varied interests present unexpected hurdles for laboratory research. We also talked about very realistic suggestions for aspiring future archaeology graduate students in how to choose a topic and a graduate program with all these non-laboratory challenges.
How does historical review play a role in interpreting data? Is there any "objectivity" in the data? We also talked about concrete examples where the assumptions about historical context totally changes how archaeologists work on the materials.

In this episode, we are experimenting with a new kind of conversation where we dive deep into a question in a certain research field with a PhD student and explore how they think about this question.
Here, we invited Vera Haponava, a first-year archaeology PhD student from the University of Edinburgh. She earned her master's degree in archaeology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. 
Her research interest is bioarchaeology, especially with stable isotopes as a research method. Her own PhD research topic includes paleodiet in Belarus from birth till adulthood, in cemeteries of ~10-12th.

In this episode of Research Journey Podcast, we invited two researchers in computational social science from Cornell University. Among all the interesting topics covered, we discussed member-based research in social sciences, how to use NLP to reveal themes in science fiction, how to deal with hate speech on social media, the Imposter Syndrome and the importance of representation, and factors essential for a successful PhD journey.

 
Our first guest is Aspen Omapang, is a third-year PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University in the Social Media Lab. She is a Data Science Fellow for the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. Her current projects include the politicization of science on Youtube, and the experiences of queer beauty content creators.

 The second guest is Federica Bologna. She is a second-year PhD student, also in Information Science at Cornell University. She has a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the interaction of NLP (Natural Language Processing), computational social science, and cultural analytics.

Credits
Host | Xiaoyue Zhu
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Generated by DALLE2, edited with Photoshop

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.

In this episode of Research Journey Podcast, we invited two historians to discuss research methods in the field of history. We talked about Jewish refugees and the role of semi-colonialism in Shanghai, what is the meaning of "archive" in history research, and how the study of history itself can be "historically-contingent".  

Our first guest, Matyas Mervay, is a sixth year PhD Candidate in East Asian and Modern European History from NYU. His research focuses on  Central European refugee communities in Republican era China. Our second guest, Dr. Kimberly Cheng, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. She earned her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History from NYU this year, with a dissertation on Central European Jewish refugee migration to China during World War II.  
 

Credits
Host | Xiaoyue Zhu
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | A refugee in the Hongkou district, center of the European Jewish refugees in Shanghai. George Lacks/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.

Have you ever wondered why you feel strong emotions when listening to that breakup song? Why music can trigger distant childhood memories, and why someone just likes music more than others? In this episode, we invited two neuroscientists in music cognition and had a truly fascinating conversation on music, neuroscience, and goosebumps.
 
Our student guest, Brandon Carone, is a second year PhD student in Cognition and Perception from NYU from Dr. Pablo Ripollés' lab. He invited Dr.Robert Zatorre, a renowned cognitive neuroscientist and professor at McGill University. Dr.Zatorre became the founding co-director of the international laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound research (BRAMS) in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2017. With his collaborators and students, Dr. Zatorre has published over 300 scientific papers on topics including pitch and melody perception, auditory imagery, music production, brain plasticity in musicians, and the role of the dopaminergic reward circuitry in mediating musical pleasure. He and his colleagues were the first research group to demonstrate that music can trigger dopamine release in the human brain.

Terms mentioned
- Dr. Brenda miller: Dr. Brenda Milner is Canada’s preeminent neuropsychologist, having pioneered research into the human brain; many consider her a founder of the field of clinical neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience.
- Music anhedonia: a neurological condition characterized by an inability to derive pleasure from music.
- Ventral tegmental area (VTA): a group of neurons located in the midbrain. It is the origin of the dopaminergic cell bodies of the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system, and is critical in the natural reward circuitry.
- Substantia Nigra (SN): Latin for "black substance" due to high levels of neuromalanin from the dopamingeric neurons. It is a midbrain nuclei with an important role in reward and movement.
- Ventral striatum (VS): a structure in the midbrain, composed of the olfactory tubercle and nucleus accumbens, which has a critical role in reward processing and motivation.
- Barcelona music reward questionnaire: a questionnaire developed by Dr. Zatorre and colleagues to measure how people experience reward associated with music. Try it out yourself here!
- Episodic memory: the memory of every day events. A collection of past personal experiences that occurred at particular times and places.
- Functional connectivity: the temporal coincidence of spatially distant neurophysiological events. Two regions are considered to show  functional connectivity if there is a statistical relationship between the measures of activity recorded from them. Note that this is different from structural connectivity, where there are anatomical connections between the two regions.
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): a noninvasive procedure that uses magnetic fields to alter the activity of neurons in the brain.
- Music transposition: refers to the process or operation of moving a collection of notes up or down in pitch by a constant interval.

Credits
Host | Xiaoyue Zhu
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Photo from Pinterest

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.

In this episode, we invited a pair of first year PhD students from Ethnic Studies in UC Berkeley. The first guest is AJ Kurdi, who is originally from Hungary. He had extensive grass-root organizing experience before joining the PhD program. His research focuses on how ethnic minority queer organizing shapes the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements and public policies.

Our second guest is Derek Wu, who came from a theology and divinity background. A second generation Taiwanese Bay Area local, he is interested in the intersection of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) communities and religion. 

Terms mentioned
- Book: Asian Americans and the spirit of racial capitalism by Jonathan Tran
- Structural injustice: The violence and harm that result from the political, economic, cultural, military, and other structures of society that have developed historically and are arranged in ways that enable some people to have vastly more access than others to resources, tools for acquiring resources, and the power to determine the terms of common life (from World Encyclopedia of Law).
- Positionality: Roughly, the social and political context that creates one's identity and how that identity influences and biases the perception of and outlook on the world. 

Credits
Host | Xiaoyue Zhu
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Generated using DALL.E2

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.

In this episode, we invited a pair of neuroscientists: the student Roshni Lulla and her advisor Dr. Jonas Kaplan. They talked about the difficulties of neuroimaging studies, the brain regions for empathy and even consciousness, how Roshni balances her PhD work with her startup role, and Dr.Jonas’s interesting idea on how to choose best grad students.
 
Roshni is a second year PhD student in University of Southern California, her research focuses on emotional processing. She also hosts the Behind Your Behavior podcast with her cousin, where they interview professional neuroscientists and explore concepts from social interactions to decision-making.

Dr. Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Research in Psychology at USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, he is also the Co-Director of the Dana & David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, and the Associate Director for Mindfulness and Neuroimaging for the USC Center for Mindfulness Science.

Terms mentioned
- fMRI: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, it measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.
- Voxels: a value on regular grid in the three-dimensional space. It represents a tidy cube of brain tissue in fMRI studies.
- Valence: referring to the intrinsic "good"-ness or "bad"-ness of an emotion.
- Insular cortex: a portion of cerebral cortex folded deep within the brain, believed to have roles in consciousness and emotional processing.
- Frontal cortex: the cerebral cortex of the frontal lobe, important for higher cognitive functions.
- Confounds / confounding variable: an unmeasured third variable that influences the study of a cause-and-effect relationship.

Credits
Host | Zhiwei Li
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Puzzle Man by illot

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.

 Dr Yi Yin, a research scientist from the California Institute of Technology, explains how she uses satellite data to study the uneven distribution of heat distribution in the city and how that reflects socioeconomic inequality.

Dr Jiachen Zhang, an Air Resources Engineer in the Mobile Source Analysis Branch at the California Air Resources Board, talks about the process of using research to enlighten policy-making.

Terms mentioned
- Albedo: the proportion of light reflected from a surface (roughly, "whiteness")
- Latent heat: energy released or absorbed, by a body or a thermodynamic system, during a constant-temperature process.
- Urban heat island: a phenomenon that occurs when cities replace natural land cover with dense concentrations of pavement, buildings, and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat. 

Credits
Host | Zhiwei Li
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.