Corrine Durisko
Learning Research and Development CenterRoom 602
3939 O'Hara St.
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
TEL: 412-624-7475
FAX: 412-624-9149
EMAIL: cgaglia@pitt.edu
I am the lab coordinator for Julie Fiez's lab in the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. I have been with the lab since June of 2002. As the coordinator, I oversee day to day operation of lab activities and troubleshoot issues that may arise in the course of a day. I also have other responsibiliteis which include: 1) contribution to research protocol development, implementation, analysis and publication, 2) aquiring and analyzing data from cognitive behavioral and functional imaging studies, 3) managing research grants, purchasing, petty cash, and subject payment, 4) supervision of full and part time research staff, 5) training of new employees, students, and visitors on policies, procedures, and scientific methodology, 6) performing scheduling and recruitment of subjects, 7) ensuring lab compliance with local, state, and federal regulations, and 8) assisting in the support of local computers and lab network.
I graduated from a small liberal arts college in New Wilmington, PA, Westminster College, with a BS in Neuroscience. At Westminster I studied memory consolidation processes in rats under Dr. Alan Gittis and completed a senior project entitled, "The Effects of Left, Dorsal Hippocampal Inactivations on Memory Consolidation in Rats". Westminster is truely a gem and I cannot speak highly enough of the education I received there.
After graduation from Westminster, I "fell into" Julie's lab. I quickly found a home in the lab and great interest in a sect of her research focused on the neural basis of working memory processing. I can also say without shame that I love studying the brain! While I worked in the lab, (and after a brief 1.5 year break from school) I decided to continue my studies and professional growth by pursuing an MS in Neuroscience. I was able to complete work for my degree at Pitt in December of 2006. For my degree work I looked at the neural correlates of the articulatory rehearsal process in working memory and the overlap between the speech-based and motor-based regions in the brain. My paper was entitled, "Exploring the Inner Speech Processes in verbal Working Memory". Some of this work will be published in the journal, Cortex, later this year. Presently, I am continuing to work on both old and new projects aimed at further elucidating the underlying brain areas involved in working memory.
After completing my MS, (and again after a brief 1+ year break from school) I found myself interested in continuing to learn more about the theoretical bases of different research methodologies, and also in increasing my statistical knowledge base. In my position, I felt it was important to have a base of skills that allowed me to better develop protocols and to more confidently discern which statistical analysis techniques were most appropriate for which projects. Given my continued need to grow and learn, I entered an MA program in Research Methodology at Pitt. I have now completed my coursework and turned in my thesis for the MA, and I anticipate graduation in December of 2009. My work for the MA focused on methods to remedy violations of the homoscedasticity assumption in OLS regression. My paper is entitled, "Performance of HCCM Estimators in OLS Regression Under Conditions of Heteroscedasticity and Non-Normality".