#SciFund Rd 3 with Dr. Elisabeth Whyte http://rkthb.co/11877

#Scifund Round 3 is underway and each day I will highlight a new proposal from the Challenge to give you a more in-depth understanding of each participant and their research.

Today I present to you Dr. Elisabeth Whyte. Her project is focused on software designed to improve the social skills and face processing abilities of autistic adolescents.

Tell us about yourself, where you are from, and where you see yourself going.

My name is Dr. Elisabeth Whyte. I am a post-doctoral research assistant at Penn State. I graduated with my PhD in developmental psychology in Summer of 2012.

How did you get involved in your research project?

Dr. Suzy Scherf, the lead investigator on our autism research project, created a computer-based intervention to improve face processing abilities of adolescents with autism. However, as some of the participants have come through the lab, we have gotten feedback that the intervention isn’t very fun. We know that motivation is an important factor for learning, and so increasing motivation for the adolescents to participate in the intervention is really an important goal for the next intervention phase.

Why is your research important to you? Why should others fund it?

In addition to being a researcher, I’m also a video game enthusiast, blogger (restokin.com), podcaster (teamwafflecast.com), etc. In watching research about video games, I came to realize that people in other health and education disciplines were using the aspects of video games that made them fun and motivating in their intervention research. I want to bring a better level of motivation and fun to computer-based interventions aimed at improving autism social impairments.

Why did you decide to participate in the SciFund Challenge?

The progress of science, especially when conducting intervention research, is really quite slow. Thus, our project’s grant funding runs out in a few months, and we still have a lot of unanswered questions! Even with submitting grant applications this Winter/spring, we still don’t have enough funds to complete the first intervention and get the second intervention started. So, we decided that crowdfunding would be a great way to solve two problems 1) it gives us a really creative way to collect the funds we need in the short-term to keep our research projects running, and 2) we get a chance to to share our Autism intervention research with the rest of the world!

What was the most difficult aspect of building your SciFund Proposal? What was your favorite?

Coming up with rewards for the SciFund proposal was actually the most difficult and my favorite part of building the proposal. It was difficult to come up with rewards that I thought people would actually want, but wouldn’t eat up all of our project funds in shipping. For example, my first idea was to get our lab logo printed on squishy stress balls shaped like a brain. However, the costs of that reward (in calculating printing costs and shipping costs) made it unfeasible to actually do. The final set of rewards that we came up with are things I’m really excited and proud of, including getting our lab’s resident artist to draw a picture of the brain that can be e-mailed and then sent in a flat packaging (lower shipping costs) to people in the US.

Tell us something random. Something funny. Something borrowed. Something blue…

As part of my role in the World of Warcraft gaming community, I write on a blog called “restokin.com“. For most of the time I was blogging, I wrote under a pseudonym (Lissanna) and haven’t talked much about my personal/work life. On day 1 of the Scifund Challenge, I posted an “about me and my research” post on my blog. http://www.restokin.com/2012/11/the-positive-side-of-video-games/

I got a lot of great e-mails, tweets, and other feedback from members of my gaming community about how their families have been affected by autism. So, I am really enjoying the chance to teach people about my research!

And to save you time from scrolling up, you can read about her project and contribute here. Thanks Dr. Whyte for sharing your science!