Volunteering in the Jagust Lab


Thank you for your interest in volunteering in the lab. We receive many requests from Berkeley undergraduate students who are interested in volunteering, but many students are not aware of the type of research we do and the skills that are required for success in the lab. Please read the following description carefully, and if you are still interested, please fill out the information on the form. We will keep your application on file, and someone from the lab will contact you when and if we are looking for a suitable research assistant. I apologize that we cannot interview each applicant individually but because of the large number of applicants we must go through this screening process. 

The lab studies brain aging and dementia using imaging techniques in human subjects. Data are collected using PET scanning and MRI scanning, as well as cognitive testing. This is not a “wet lab”, but rather a “dry lab”. Brain images are numerical values in the form of 3 or 4 dimensional matrices. The graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff in the lab spend considerable time and effort analyzing the data using computer programs. Thus, computer skills are necessary to work in the lab.

The types of work we do includes using established software, such as statistical packages to do hypothesis testing, as well as our own code written in Matlab, Python, and R. Some of the software is open access and publicly available used to analyze brain images. This code is used to run processes that produce numerical summary data from the images. This involves the use of processing “pipelines” that output data for statistical analysis.

Because most of the work in the lab is fundamentally computational, students who succeed usually have a strong background in computer science. That is not a required major, as students in psychology, MCB, integrative biology and various engineering fields have made useful contributions. However, strong computer skills are necessary for success.

 

Please fill out the following questionnaire: