2018 Conference for High Impact Research

This session will feature two American University faculty members who have been successful in obtaining external funding to support their scholarship. These cases exemplify the high impact research that enhance the national reputation of the University. Jeff Gill, distinguished professor of government, and Mark Laubach, professor of biology, will discuss their work and their paths to achieving productive research outcomes.

Statistical Modeling to Understand Terrorism: An Overview of New Tools
Jeff Gill
Governments around the world spend an enormous about of resources attempting to understand and prevent terrorist attacks. Unfortunately these efforts continue to be only partially successful. Data that describe terrorist events is particularly difficult to analyze, due to the many problems associated with the collection process, unusual clustered variability in the data itself, and the typically poor level of measurement coming from pursuing political actors that seek to deny reliable observations on their activities. In this talk, Jeff Gill will describe some recent statistical innovations that provide revealing and important trends in terrorist activities worldwide. The examples will describe sophisticated statistical procedures in accessible and general language. Many of the conclusions are surprising and show systematic behavior by these violent and dangerous groups.

The OpenBehavior Project
Mark Laubach
An ongoing technological revolution in neuroscience, supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative, has yielded a broad array of new tools to observe and manipulate neural circuits. In parallel, many newly developed technologies to measure and control behavior have been developed but have not been widely shared or disseminated. As such, there remains a gap between the availability of new behavioral tools and their wide deployment by the larger research community. The OpenBehavior Project is addressing this issue by providing an integrated set of activities to facilitate dissemination of resources and training materials for creating and using newly developed technologies for the study of behavior. Our goal is to dramatically lower barriers that researchers face in carrying out sophisticated behavioral neuroscience experiments and raise overall research productivity.