Issue link: http://ncumarketing.uberflip.com/i/1453554
I am very excited to share with you that Dr. Patrick McNamara, along with his colleague Dr. Jordan Grafman from Northwestern School of Medicine, was awarded a significant grant from the Templeton Foundation. The title of this 3-year, 6.4 million dollar project is The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition. NCU will receive approximately 2 million dollars of the grant money. As per Dr. McNamara: There are 3 major "arms" of the project. The first arm involves a curated grant competition wherein I and Dr. Grafman will call for and evaluate grant proposals from other researchers on the brain and religion topic area. They expect to award some 3 million dollars to at least 8-10 research teams who pass rigorous scientific review. The work of these research teams will catalyze overall scientific development in this new emerging field of the cognitive neuroscience of religion. I hope NCU faculty would be interested in submitting proposals. A second arm of the overall project involves a series of fMRI neuroimaging studies on over 100 religiously diverse participants at the Northwestern site. The third arm of the project involves a series of studies handled by my staff at NCU. Some 150 participants will be recruited from 3 sites (Jerusalem, Chicago, and Boston) for an intensive daily data collection effort on these participants across 2-3 weeks. All data collection efforts for these NCU studies will be digitized, with data collected in the home being wirelessly transmitted to the NCU research team. Neurophysiologic, health, mood, personality, cognitive, and spirituality measures will be collected. In addition, in-depth qualitative interviews will be conducted with all 150 participants. Opportunities for NCU graduate students interested in participating in these qualitative interview studies have been planned. Finally, an agent-based neurocomputational model of the brain systems involved in religious cognition will be constructed with data gathered from the NCU studies being used to calibrate the model. There will be opportunities for Northcentral University faculty and students to participate in different aspects of the studies. Among these opportunities for students are doctoral projects and unpaid research assistantships with opportunities for publications or conference presentations. I am so very excited about this amazing opportunity for Dr. McNamara, Northcentral University faculty and students, as well as for the Psychology Department. Please join me in congratulating Dr. McNamara on this wonderful achievement. My best, Bettina Shapira, PhD Department Chair, Department of Psychology Department Updates Bettina Shapira, PhD 14 Northcentral University Psychology Bulletin