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International student Johnny Lau talks about the research he is undertaking and the facilities at his disposal for hi PhD in Psychology within the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham.
Duration: 3.23 mins
Speaker Names (if given): S1 King Lam (Johnny) Lau
S1 I'm Johnny Lau, I'm studying at the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham.
I'm Johnny Lau, I'm studying at the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. (repeated in Cantonese)
I chose to study in Birmingham because it is a world class university and it is highly rated as a research institute because of its research contribution and involvement and I actually came to here because of the opportunity.
I got funded to do my masters here and so I thought why not try something new and also where I'm from it's very well known for the psychology, especially the neurosciences. I did my undergraduate study in Hong Kong then I did a masters here in Birmingham before I started my PhD.
I'm doing a project on the resting state, so I study the brain connectivity of the stroke patients during the resting state. What I'm trying to look at is the neural correlates of the cognitive behaviour especially attention. Recent research has suggested the resting state has specific functions for us to understand the brain, but we still don't know what specific functions about this state of consciousness. That's why I'm interested in doing that. It’s actually a newly developed assessment too, and we are planning to incorporate it in the NHS care pathway so the hope is that it helps the rehabilitation of patients of a stroke.
People at the school of psychology use a wide variety of neuroimaging techniques. Some of my peers they use the EEG techniques, and some do TMS and what I'm doing is fMRI imaging. I actually feel quite lucky to be able to use the fMRI equipment here because it's actually very expensive and I think the radiologists and the researcher here are very helpful as well.
My supervisors they're really supportive. I consider myself to be a layman in the field still and they actually gave me a lot of support and guidance and the University itself it encourage a lot of interdisciplinary collaboration which is a really different thing from what I did in the past and also my supervisors encourage me to involve in projects involving some overseas institute as well. I can see a lot of opportunity here.
Birmingham as a city is very multicultural, people are very respectful of each other. Yeah, I would really recommend Birmingham to all the people who are looking for a place to do a PhD.
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