Newly established Marek Sinason Memorial Fund advances psychology graduate's research skill set

A fund has been set up at The University of Birmingham to provide an annual award of £250 to reward excellence in final year UK undergraduate or Masters students in psychology and/or music.

The fund was set up in memory of Marek Sinason (1971-2018) who completed his PhD "The Cognitive Context of Sensorimotor Synchronisation" at The University of Birmingham. Marek was deeply interested in the philosophy and psychology of time at mutliple length scales. He contributed greatly to the ethos of the Sensory Motor Neuroscience (SyMoN) lab, both during his thesis research and, afterwards, working on the EU CogWatch and Coglaboration projects.

The award is intended to support living costs of the holder spending a period of up to two weeks working on psychology and music research projects in The University of Birmingham Schools of Psychology and Music.

The award is managed by Prof Alan Wing, Dr Max Di Luca (in Psychology) and Dr Maria Witek (in Music).

The first award has been made to Katrina Galsworthy for 2021. Katrina writes "I grew up in Oxford and came to Birmingham for my BSc Liberal Arts and Sciences, for which I majored in Psychology. In the summer between my third and fourth years, I did a studentship with Dr Witek and Prof Wing when I first worked on the psychology of timing. Specifically, I helped with a project on synchronisation in a virtual quartet. I have stayed on at Birmingham for my MSc in Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics, during which I have particularly enjoyed learning about various computational models and how to implement them. I am currently working as a Research Assistant, continuing some of the work on musical synchronisation, and hope to do a Psychology PhD in the near future. I am grateful for the opportunity that the Marek Sinason Memorial Fund offers me and, through this work, I hope to honour Marek’s memory."