Teaching with Big Data: Report from the 2016 Society for Neuroscience Teaching Workshop

Authors

William Grisham, University of California, Los Angeles
Joshua C. Brumberg, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Terri Gilbert, Allen Institute for Brain Science
Linda Lanyon, International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility
Robert W. Williams, University of Tennessee
Richard F. Olivo, Smith CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2017

Publication Title

The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education (JUNE)

Abstract

As part of a series of workshops on teaching neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience annual meetings, William Grisham and Richard Olivo organized the 2016 workshop on "Teaching Neuroscience with Big Data." This article presents a summary of that workshop.

Speakers provided overviews of open datasets that could be used in teaching undergraduate courses. These included resources that already appear in educational settings, including the Allen Brain Atlas (presented by Joshua Brumberg and Terri Gilbert), and the Mouse Brain Library and GeneNetwork (presented by Robert Williams). Other resources, such as NeuroData (presented by William R. Gray Roncal), and OpenFMRI, NeuroVault, and Neurosynth (presented by Russell Poldrack) have not been broadly utilized by the neuroscience education community but offer obvious potential.

Finally, William Grisham discussed the iNeuro Project, an NSF-sponsored effort to develop the necessary curriculum for preparing students to handle Big Data. Linda Lanyon further elaborated on the current state and challenges in educating students to deal with Big Data and described some training resources provided by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility. Neuroinformatics is a subfield of neuroscience that deals with data utilizing analytical tools and computational models. The feasibility of offering neuroinformatics programs at primarily undergraduate institutions was also discussed.

Keywords

Big Data, neuroinformatics, educational resources, Allen Brain Atlas, Mouse Brain Library, GeneNetwork NeuroData, OpenfMRI, NeuroVault, Neurosynth, INCF, iNeuro

Volume

16

Issue

1

First Page

A68

Last Page

A76

Rights

Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy

Comments

Archived as published.

Recommended Citation

Grisham, William; Brumberg, Joshua C.; Gilbert, Terri; Lanyon, Linda; Williams, Robert W.; and Olivo, Richard F., "Teaching with Big Data: Report from the 2016 Society for Neuroscience Teaching Workshop" (2017). Neuroscience: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/nsc_facpubs/6