Yusuke Hayashi(9/09) Yusuke Hayashi Postdoctoral Researcher Ph.D., Psychology West Virginia University I recently joined the wonderful research team at Life Span Institute at Parsons and am happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself. I’m originally from Tokyo. Although I was a history major in my undergraduate work, I happened to take a course in behavior analysis, which completely changed my life later. After I obtained my B.A. in history, I got a job in the IT industry and became very interested in business consulting based on Organizational Behavior Management , which is an application of behavior analysis in business. After having been a happy workaholic (yes, I’m Japanese) for about three years, I decided to go back to grad school to receive formal training in OBM. During my training at University of North Texas, however, Manish Vaidya, a former post-doc here at LSI, opened my eyes to the basic science of behavior. I then decided to pursue my Ph.D. in Psychology from West Virginia University, where I was involved in basic animal laboratory research on the processes that Dean Williams is applying to the study of maladaptive behavior in individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID). Although my specialty throughout my graduate training was basic research in stimulus control, I also worked with children with autism and individuals with ID. I enjoyed working in both basic and applied fields. Here at LSI, I work on two projects: Laboratory Models of Maladaptive Escape Behaviors (with Dean Williams) and Recombinative Generalization of Within-syllable Units in MR (with Kate Saunders). Given my strong interest in both basic and applied domains, I will dedicate myself to conducting translational research with individuals with ID during my post-doctoral training. Needless to say, LSI is well known for its excellence in translational research, so I’m very fortunate to be a part of the research team. As a person who grew up in Tokyo, I would say that life in Parsons is a little bit different from my other experiences thus far. As long as there is good research and some Asian food, however, I’m confident that I can live anywhere in the world. Indeed, I like Parsons much better than I thought. I enjoy fishing and not having traffic jams. |
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