Education

The curriculum, published

Journal club, an eight-week methods sequence, and workshops. All of it is open to any UT student, whether or not they are a Fellow, and none of it costs anything.

Journal club

Every other week during the semester, one paper, one member presenting, thirty minutes of discussion. Papers chosen for having something wrong with them as often as for being landmarks.

WeekFocusPresenter
1A landmark paper in the current project areaTBA
3A direct challenge to that landmarkTBA
5A methods paper underlying bothTBA
7A failed replication, read closelyTBA
9A preprint from the last six monthsTBA
11Member's choiceTBA

Methods sequence

Eight sessions, run once per year, ninety minutes each. Published as an outline so it can be argued with rather than taken on trust.

  1. Reading a paper against itself

    Figures before abstract. What the data would look like if the claim were false.

  2. Study design and what it can support

    Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and within-subject designs, and the claims each cannot license.

  3. Effect sizes, intervals, and power

    Why an underpowered significant result is weaker evidence than a null one, not stronger.

  4. Pre-registration and the garden of forking paths

    Reading a registration against the paper that came out of it.

  5. Neuroimaging data, concretely

    What a BIDS dataset contains, what a preprocessing pipeline does to it, and where the choices are.

  6. Diffusion MRI and tractography

    Reconstruction, its ambiguities, and why a tract image is a model and not a photograph.

  7. Systematic search and extraction

    Building a search, an inclusion log, and an extraction sheet that someone else could rerun.

  8. Writing the thing

    Structure, figures, authorship, and how to submit.

Workshops

Workshop dates for the coming term are published on the events page as they are set.

The tractography on the home page was reconstructed from a chapter member's own diffusion MRI, using the pipeline the sixth session above would cover. The chapter can teach this because it has already done it.