Have You Met Rutgers-Newark?

Thanks to the leadership of Dr. Stephen José Hanson, Rutgers University is among a small number of research universities that can boast the existence of a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facility on campus. Called the Rutgers University Brain Imaging Center (RUBIC) and based in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Science (CMBN) at Rutgers-Newark, the RUBIC houses a high-tech Siemens TRIO 3T MRI scanner. Assessing the change in blood flow related to neural activity in the brains of humans and animals, the equipment allows the precise measurement of the source and destination of major neural pathways and provides insight into how the brain adapts and processes information. In addition to permitting access to the MRI scanner, the RUBIC offers researchers from all three Rutgers campuses and other institutions and businesses in the region an array of advanced features such as systems for eye-tracking and physiological data collection, and high-capacity data storage and analysis.

Hanson is one of the principal investigators instrumental in securing the $1.82 million grant from the National Science Foundation used to acquire the Siemens TRIO 3T MRI. He is the director of the RUBIC and heads its day-to-day operations with a management team that includes Dr. Mauricio Delgado of Rutgers-Newark’s Psychology Department and Dr. Bart Krekelberg of the CMBN, along with assistance from a staff physicist and a research coordinator.

A professor of psychology at Rutgers-Newark, Hanson also is a member of the Cognitive Science Center at Rutgers-New Brunswick and Information Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has held positions as chair of the Psychology Department at Rutgers-Newark, co-director of the University-Medical School Brain Imaging Center, and director of the Learning System Sciences Department at SIEMENS Research Center (Princeton, Munich, and Paris). From 1989-2000, he was a founding member of the Advisory Board of the McDonnell-PEW Cognitive Neuroscience Program that helped initiate and foster much of the cognitive neuroscience field. Hanson is the editor of Foundational Issues in Human Brain Mapping (The MIT Press, 2010) and is working on a book: Brain Reading: Multivariate Pattern Analysis, Prediction, and Visualization of Brain Imaging Data. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he earned his doctoral, master, and bachelor’s degrees.