User:Jkadutho/sandbox

Laura Thi Germine (born May 7, 1981) is an American cognitive neuropsychologist, faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and faculty of Neuroscience at McLean Hospital. At McLean, she is Director of the Laboratory for Brain and Cognitive Health Technology and Technical Director of the Institute for Technology in Psychiatry. Germine is also Founder and Director of TestMyBrain.org along with Ken Nakayama and Jeremy Wilmer, and the nonprofit organization, The Many Brains Project.

Education
Germine received her B.A. in 2004 from the University of California, Berkeley in Molecular & Cell Biology (Neurobiology). She went on to complete her Ph.D. in 2012 from Harvard University in Psychology (Experimental Psychopathology). From 2012-2016, Germine was a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetic Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and a Research Associate at the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory.

Research
Germine's research interest is oriented around understanding individual differences in cognitive functioning across the lifespan, what factors shape the way we think, how these individual differences are driven by variations in environmental and genetic factors, and the relationship between cognitive functioning and psychiatric vulnerability.

Citizen Science Platform
Germine's approach is based on creating broadly accessible research tools, implemented through web applications and mobile devices, and then making those research tools available to the public. This use of citizen science allows people to use these tools to understand more about themselves, while at the same time contributing valuable data about the mind and brain. As of 2018 TestMyBrain.org, has collected data from over 2 million people has and validated techniques for web-based assessment of cognition and behavior. (LINK TO MGH SPOTLIGHT***)

Major Contributions
Major research contributions include the translation of discoveries from basic cognitive neuroscience research to validated tools for high-throughput cognitive phenotyping, mobile health assessment, and broad participant engagement using the web. They also include the establishment and validation of methods for combining traditional neuropsychological measurement principles and discoveries in cognitive neuroscience with the growing domain of digital, cloud-based, and/or mobile health technologies. The technology development efforts are centered around a fundamental reconceptualization of the research laboratory, based on the principles that treating participants as partners can increase both social and scientific impact, and that understanding human variability and diversity can be accomplished outside of a traditional laboratory or clinical setting. (add references***)