Williamson builds on concussion research to fuel John C. Young project
This article is part of a series featuring Centre College’s 2022 John C. Young (JCY) Scholars. Centre’s JCY program, now in its 32nd year, is designed to serve highly motivated seniors, allowing them to engage in independent study, research or artistic work in their major discipline or in an interdisciplinary area of their choosing. View the complete listing of JCY Scholar projects here.
Lucas Williamson ’22 shared an in-depth research experience with Associate Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience KatieAnn Skogsberg during the 2020-21 academic year. Their research on event-related potential (ERP) and concussion diagnostics led him to his current-year JCY study, “Damage Report: A Machine Learning Approach to Concussion Diagnosis using Brain Network Activation.”
“I noticed some papers were applying machine learning models to their ERP data, and I found this interesting as it related to both my behavioral neuroscience and computer science majors,” Williamson said. “I figured conducting a JCY project in this area would serve as a fitting conclusion to my undergraduate degree work at Centre, and it also gave me the opportunity to explore and understand the immensely useful field of machine learning, which is more of a data science topic at Centre.”
The research proved to be a positive experience in many ways. Assistant Professor of Computer Science Thomas Allen was Williamson’s advisor and said that it was an encouraging experience for the senior, noting that the topic is a “compelling need” that could help people with concussions.
“For this project, Lucas worked with previously collected data, hoping to find something that others had missed,” Allen said. “But just getting access to that data turned out to be a huge challenge. There are many hurdles. That’s frustrating, but it’s also good preparation for graduate school, and life in general. Persistence is key.”
Allen explained that Lucas deployed a wide range of machine learning methods, but, ultimately, none of those were able to unlock clues that previous researchers had missed.
“But that’s OK,” Allen continued. “Research doesn’t always give you the answers you want, but it still gives you answers. It gives you a deeper understanding of the problem. That in turn can lead to better experiment design and novel techniques.
“The methods and experience he gains from this will be useful in the future.”
Williamson, a native of Collierville, Tennessee, said the JCY research has helped him prepare for his post-graduate career: he will begin a Ph.D. program in neuroscience in August.
“Having a solid machine learning project under my belt will be excellent experience and preparation for the next several years as I pursue my graduate degree,” he said. “I also got some insight into what real independent research is like—lots of dead ends that necessitate critical thinking and problem solving to keep project progress rolling.”
