A new director of the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging began work Monday.
Assistant professor of psychology Scott Frey hopes to increase the number of departments that use the center – a component of the University’s Brain, Biology and Machine Initiative – and hopes to attract more students to work as research assistants or perform research projects. He also hopes to allay fears about the center’s research that is funded by the Department of Defense.
“We want to kind of transcend being exclusive to any small handful of departments,” Frey said.
The center, located on the north end of Straub Hall, is built around the Siemens Allegra 3 Tesla, a machine that performs functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the human brain. The machine is essentially a large magnet that tracks brain activity by measuring the flow of blood and oxygen to various regions of the brain.
While the actual operation of the machine must be done by trained operators, Frey said most aspects of designing a study that uses fMRI technology could be done by an undergraduate honors student.
Currently, most of the research done with the machine is from the departments of psychology, biology and human physiology. Some of the center’s current projects include the effect of drugs on adolescent brain function, the role of being left or right-handed in stroke recovery and a simulation of how a congenitally deaf person sees, according to the center’s Web site.
Frey said he hopes more departments that are interested in behavioral science, such as the economics department and the College of Education, will begin using the center. He will hold a workshop to educate interested faculty about the equipment at the end of this month.
Frey came to the University in fall 2004. He was previously employed at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School, where he said many students used fMRI technology for research projects.
“To have a facility like this that is research-dedicated is a really special thing,” Frey said, adding that usually fMRI machines are only present at medical schools. “I’m very excited about trying to understand in part how the human brain functions.”

Chuck Theobald, System Administrator for the center, said he’s happy Frey was selected as director and is looking forward to his efforts to increase the number of students who use the center.
“It’s a research facility here, and I think the more people that are exposed to it and understand what functional magnetic resonance imaging can be used for, the better,” Theobald said. “It’s a noninvasive technique for seeing things that we can’t see otherwise.”
In addition to his duties as director, Frey will teach one undergraduate course and one graduate course per year in the psychology department.
“This administrative role is a new experience for me,” Frey said. “It gives me a chance to increase the sphere I can really impact and hopefully bring positive changes to.”
Positive changes are something Frey hopes Department of Defense-funded research will bring to society.
Currently, the Department of Defense is funding the center’s research into how people who have lost arms or legs adapt to using prosthetic limbs.
Frey said preliminary findings indicate that when the body loses a limb, the brain reorganizes its functions significantly, and the area of the brain that was previously used to control the lost limb becomes used for other purposes. Thus, if someone loses a limb, it is important to get the person a prosthesis before his or her brain loses the capacity to control that limb.
Shriners Hospital in Portland, which provides free medical care to children with missing limbs, is also involved with this research, Frey said.
“I think that it’s important for people to realize that this is an example of using Department of Defense funding on campus that is going to be beneficial,” Frey said, adding that both military personnel and civilians who are injured will benefit from this research.
The funding for this work is difficult to obtain because private industry doesn’t see the number of amputees as high enough to justify funding research and because federal organizations such as the National Institutes of Health are having their budgets cut, Frey said.
Frey said his interest in helping people with spinal cord injuries and amputated limbs was influenced by his mother’s experience with multiple sclerosis, a chronic degenerative disease that eventually left her completely paralyzed.
“To me, it’s a real personal sort of mission to learn what we can about how to help these folks, and that mission transcends one’s personal feelings about the war,” Frey said. “For me, it’s a completely separate issue.”
Frey said that while he is not in favor of the war in Iraq and doesn’t know any faculty members who are, he said he’s been surprised by the amount of the campus activism against military research, describing an e-mail he’d received saying that University research was being used to implant soldiers’ brains with the ability to fight after they’d lost their limbs.
“It’s actually kind of humorous because it’s so preposterous,” Frey said.
Frey said it is possible that in the future, scientific developments will allow amputees to move prosthetic limbs with their brains. He said he recently saw one person at Brown University who was paralyzed from the neck down and was able to control a cursor on a computer screen using only brain activity.
“I have to look at myself in the mirror every morning, and I wouldn’t take money from any organization, military or otherwise, that wasn’t using science for humanitarian purposes,” Frey said.

Contact the business, science and technology reporter at [email protected]
News editor Meghann M. Cuniff contributed to this report