Meryem Yücel promoted to Research Associate Professor
Congratulations to Meryem Yücel for her promotion to Research Associate Professor. Meryem is the Technical Director of fNIRS efforts within the BU Neurophotonics Center and supports more than 8 different faculty and their teams in the adoption and utilization of fNIRS in their applications. Meryem was an Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School from 2015-2018 until she moved to BU where she was a Research Assistant Professor from 2018-2022. She has published 24 papers since 2016. She received 600 citations of her papers in 2021 alone and has an h-index of 23.
Two recent papers well exemplify the exploding impact she is having in the fNIRS community:
“Best Practices for fNIRS publications.” In this paper she lead a group of 22 leaders in the fNIRS field in laying out guidelines for performing and reporting fNIRS research. This paper was published in 2021 and has already been cited over 50 times. Recognizing her leadership in the field, she was recently elected to the Board of the Society for fNIRS, was the SfNIRS Conference Chair in 2021 and is leading the educational program for the SfNIRS 2022 conference.
“Towards Neuroscience of the Everyday World (NEW) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy.” Published in Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering in 2021, Meryem worked with her BU colleagues to lay out their vision for the future utilization of fNIRS with EEG, eye-tracking and other environmental sensors to study brain function in ecologically valid settings to greatly expand our understanding of human brain function to include studies of the social, interactive, and movement activities that make us human. She is now working with more than 8 different faculty at BU and their trainees to realize this vision.