About the Office of Fellowship Training
OFT Mission
The mission of the Office of Fellowship Training is:
- To support and promote a productive and fulfilling research training experience in the NIMH Intramural Research Program
- To encourage career planning and guide career management through trainee use of Individual Development Plans (IDPs)
- To provide programs and services to assist trainees in discovering and clarifying career choices
- To provide opportunities and to encourage trainees to build a professional skill set which enables them to become world leaders in academic and non-academic careers
Come visit our booth and speak with an OFT staff member about the fellowship and training opportunities we offer at the NIH/NIMH. We will be at the following scientific meetings: Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS), The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) and Society for Neuroscience (SfN).
Trainee Successes: Past & Present
Elizabeth Wat, M.D. is a former NIMH summer intern (2019), through the Summer Internship Program (SIP), where she first joined Dr. Peter Bandettini’s Section on Functional Imaging Methods (SFIM). Under the mentorship of Drs. Bandettini, Peter Molfese, and Emily Finn, her research focused on new ways of analyzing an archival fMRI dataset of naturalistic story reading to examine how the adult brain processes language embedding. While originally hoping to return again in 2020, the summer program was cancelled due to the pandemic. Instead, Elizabeth returned as a summer intern in 2021 after her first year of medical school. She applied the same methodological approaches of naturalistic fMRI to a dataset of early-reading children listening to stories in the fMRI. Elizabeth presented a poster on the interesting findings at the 2022 Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) conference. Based on the feedback and excitement from the poster presentation, Elizabeth continued to work on the project as a special volunteer in the lab, culminating in a paper that was recently published.
Elizabeth graduated in May 2024 with an M.D. from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Her scholarly achievements, including her research, resulted in her induction into Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical honor society. She is currently participating in the residency match for the field of child neurology and plans on continuing her neuroimaging research in the hopes of giving patients and families answers.
Education
M.D. – University of Virginia School of Medicine
B.A. – Neuroscience, University of Virginia
Selected Publication
Wat, E. K., Jangraw, D. C., Finn, E. S., Bandettini, P. A., Preston, J. L., Landi, N., Hoeft, F., Frost, S. J., Lau, A., Chen, G., Pugh, K. R., & Molfese, P. J. (2023). Will you read how I will read? Naturalistic fMRI predictors of emergent reading. Neuropsychologia, 193, 108763. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108763