Expertise and facilities
As a member of the cross-HEI Combined Universities Brain Imaging Centre (CUBIC), Brunel jointly owns and operates a 3T Siemens MAGNETOM TIM Trio MRI scanner (with Royal Holloway, Surrey & Roehampton) installed in a purpose-built lab suite and run with the support of a specialist MRI technician. Established in 2003, through a £1.5 million university investment, this research-dedicated system offers high resolution, real time fMRI, MR spectroscopy (3D Chemical Shift Imaging), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for 3D white matter tractography.
Within the Division of Psychology, there are the following facilities:
- (1) a dedicated EEG laboratory (288ft2) houses 32- and 64-channel (MRI compatible) Neuroscan EEG systems,
- (2) a dedicated visual psychophysics laboratory equipped with display systems and a VSG 2/5 stimulus generator (Cambridge Research Systems),
- (3) eye-tracking facilities (Eye Link 1000: SR Research Ltd), and
- (4) cubicles for behavioural testing.
Through collaborative arrangements across the University, researchers in Psychology also have access to
- (1) a Magstim BiStim2 TMS and tDCS systems for brain stimulation/modulation research,
- (2) a NX12 [TC]² 3D Body Scanner for anthropometric measurements, and
- (3) Brunel’s BITLab £2 million virtual reality centre, with facilities for motion capture and animation.
Other facilities include an extensive collection of AV, laboratory and computing hardware resources, psychometric test library, specialist equipment and laboratories for participant photography/video, and infant research.
Most of our researchers have expertise in fieldwork. There are opportunities to collect data in several field sites globally including Mauritius and Fiji. We also have expertise in data scraping, natural language processing, sentiment mining etc. in R and Python.