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Welcome to Methods for Dummies!

Methods for Dummies (MfD) is a course taught by its participants, and aims to give a basic introduction to human brain imaging analysis methods, focusing on fMRI and M/EEG. The course is open to anyone who is willing to commit to giving at least one of the lectures of the course. Don't worry if you don't know much yet, you'll get help preparing your lecture!

Slides from previous years are all online for you to use, you will present in pairs of two, and there will be a resident expert assigned to you to help you figure out how best to explain and demonstrate your analysis method. You will be given the opportunity to ask them questions and rehearse your presentation with them and on the day of your lecture they will be there to (help you) answer questions.

Meetings are held on Wednesday afternoons from 13.00 - 14.00 in the board room at the FIL (1st floor, 12 Queen Square) and on MS Teams.

See the presentation schedule for MfD 2023-24 and last year's slides **HERE**



Why should I sign up?

The MfD course is a unique opportunity to learn from and with your peers about analysis methods used and developed at the FIL.

The great thing about the course and the reason for its continued popularity is that it is taught by its participants. This means that if you are willing to commit to giving a lecture, you will be returned with an excellent grounding in a range of analysis methods, the opportunity to explore topics that particularly interests you in more depth and get answers to basic questions of practical importance for you. Furthermore, the course aims to provide demonstrations of how to use the relevant SPM functions so you will be able to understand and use them.

See one - Do one - Teach one.

Bonus reasons to sign up: a signed certificate stating that you gave a lecture (and its topic) at the end of the course.


What does it involve?

Giving a short (~20 minute) presentation along with a partner on a topic of your choice. There will be an expert at hand to help you and you are not expected to know or have used the method before. The most important thing is that once you commit to giving a talk you don't cancel last minute. That way, everyone gets the most out of it. Each talk will be 45 min + time for questions. Generally it should introduce the relevant theory followed by a practical step-by-step walk through the SPM12 interface..

The aim is to make these topics understandable to people like yourselves, who may know very little about statistics, neuro-imaging or SPM. You're not trying to teach experts. The environment is very friendly and informal so there is nothing to fear!

See the Presenter's Guide, slides from previous years, and resources. Don't just copy the old slides though, many things have changed over the years and your information should be up to date and include as many practical examples as possible.


Meetings are held on Wednesday afternoons from 13.00 - 14.00 in the board room at the FIL (1st floor, 12 Queen Square) and on MS Teams.

See the presentation schedule for MfD 2023-2024 is here.

For further information or to be added to the mailing list, please contact one of this year's organisers/head dummies:

Arjun Ramaswamy: arjun.ramaswamy.19@ucl.ac.uk
Keying Wang (Jane): keying.wang.21@ucl.ac.uk