Alex Mitko, the son of Donna and John Mitko of Cranbury and a senior at Hamilton College, spent the summer as an intern at the Boston Attention and Learning Lab. A neuroscience major at Hamilton, he is a graduate of Princeton High School.
This summer Mr. Mitko took the principles he’s learned as a neuroscience major at Hamilton into an internship with the Boston Attention and Learning Lab (BAL Lab), a cognitive neuroscience lab located in the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Jamaica Plains, Boston. The BAL Lab conducts research that focuses on “the cognitive and neural mechanisms of attention, as well as the potential for enhancing attention abilities through cognitive training.”
Through previous research with Assistant Professor of Psychology Alexandra List, he had collaborated with Dr. Michael Esterman, one of the cofounders of the BAL Lab, through whom he was able to acquire his position this summer. He secured funding for his internship from the Jeffrey Fund Science Internship Fund managed by Hamilton’s Career Center.
Mr. Mitko was involved in multiple studies exploring sustained attention, primarily working on two particular projects, one utilizing Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and another making use of electrical stimulation to the brain. Both techniques represent noninvasive brain stimulation techniques that are safe to perform on human participants, enabling the lab’s researchers to examine a given subject’s performance in a number of cognitive tasks.
In addition, he was responsible for analyzing data collected from thousands of participants around the world that elected to complete one of the lab’s “sustained attention tasks” online.
“I’ve been able to help out in the analysis of some fMRI (functional magnetic resonance) scans,” he explained, “and we are starting some work on studies with patients that exhibit hemi-spatial neglect, a spatial attention disorder.”
He said that this internship was valuable for the hands-on opportunities that it offered.
“My experience at the (BAL) Lab has been incredibly engaging because every day I get hands-on experience with neuroscience techniques that previously I have only read about in textbooks,” he claimed. “It is inspiring to see how the things we learn in classes at Hamilton are applied to real-world research.”
These skills that he has acquired and honed will be profitably employed, he said, both in the classroom and in the context of his upcoming senior thesis.
“Working in the BAL Lab has helped me learn how to effectively work in a research team in order to accomplish a shared goal, and I’m eager to apply the skills I’ve learned over the summer when I work on my senior thesis,” Mr. Mitko said.
