Yelda Alkan, second year biomedical engineering doctoral student, is one of five graduate students to win the student paper and travel award from the IEEE Neural Engineering Conference held in Antalya, Turkey, in April 2009.  Her work was using a blind source separation algorithm - called independent component analysis - to investigate different circuits within the brain while doing a visual learning task quantified via functional MRI.  Her work has application to understand how vision rehabilitation occurs to improve the visual system of those who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury.  Yelda is currently being co-advised by Bharat Biswal in the Department of Radiology of UMDNJ and Tara Alvarez in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at NJIT.

The first picture is Dr. Dominque Durand, Yelda Alkan and Dr. Metin Akay.  The next picture is the group of the 5 graduate students and the 5 post doctoral students who won the paper awards.