Congratulations to Dr. Jason Smith on his well-deserved promotion to Associate Research Professor! Jason is truly exceptional and genuinely deserving of this promotion. He is a wonderful scientific partner and has made many important contributions to the Department of Psychology and the larger University of Maryland (UMD) neuroimaging community.
Jason has served as Director of Imaging Science in the Shackman Lab since 2014. In that time, he has played a leadership role, spearheading multiple research projects and grants, and providing thoughtful mentorship and training to students and faculty. Jason is hardworking, productive, creative, generous with his technical expertise, and scientifically rigorous. He is always willing to pitch in, whether that be volunteering to drive from his home in Bethesda to College Park for a crucial scanning session, submitting to multiple rounds of COVID testing to keep a sponsored project running through a global pandemic, or hosting a lab holiday party at his home.
Bringing Home the Bacon. At the time of his tenure review, Jason had served as a Co-Investigator, staff scientist, or consultant on millions of dollars of sponsored research projects led by UMD faculty (Blanchard, Dougherty, Hamilton, and Shackman), including 5 current NIH R01 awards and 4 prior awards. He also served as a Co-Investigator on 5 other R01 applications that were ultimately not funded.
An Inventive Scientist. Rachael Tillman’s master’s thesis is a classic example of Jason’s scientific ingenuity and support for clinical students (Tillman et al HBM 2018). The project leveraged publicly available fMRI data collected by Mike Milham’s group at the Nathan Kline Institute (Rockland sample). These data posed a number of unexpected technical challenges (e.g. how to optimally process idiosyncratically “de-faced” T1w anatomical scans), and Jason devised thoughtful solutions to each. Indeed, this project motivated him to further refine and optimize the MRI data processing pipeline used by my lab. Variants of Jason’s best-practices pipeline have since been adopted by a number of UMD labs, and Jason’s informal technical guidance influenced the development of fmriprep, an increasingly popular canned pipeline for fMRI data processing and quality control. He also recently organized a technical workshop, focused on quality control for fMRI, at the Czech National Institute of Mental Health.
Service to the UMD Neuroimaging Community and Beyond. Jason played a central role in the installation of the eye tracker and the electrical stimulator (‘shocker’) used by multiple groups at the Maryland Neuroimaging Center (MNC). He has since provided guidance on installation, best practices, and usage to investigators at UMD, UC Davis, Yonsei University, and elsewhere. Working closely with the MNC, Jason also contributed to early testing of advanced ‘multiband’ MRI pulse sequences at the MNC, sequences that are now routinely used by most UMD imaging labs. In addition, he currently serves as the system administrator and operational manager of the NeuroImaging Back-Up Server (NIMBUS), a secure off-site storage resource that services a number of UMD investigators (Bernat, Blanchard, Fox, Gard, Hamilton, Redcay, Riggins, and Shackman). Jason played a central role in establishing NIMBUS, which represents a collaborative partnership between the Shackman Lab, the Division of Information Technology (DIT), and the Office of Academic Computing Services (OACS). This involved innumerable emails and meetings with all of the various stakeholders. NIMBUS has allowed campus investigators to systematically back-up their imaging data, in some cases for the first time, while avoiding the high fees associated with alternative approaches, saving them tens of thousands of dollars.
Training & Mentorship. Jason is an outstanding trainer and mentor, and has played a crucial unsung role in numerous student projects, including 3 dissertations (McCarthy, Bradshaw, and Tillman), 3 master’s theses (Kaplan, Tillman, and Grogans), a NACS First Year Project (Kim), 2 senior theses, and multiple fellowship applications and awards (e.g. NSF GRF, NSF Combine, Wylie Dissertation Award). Jason has provided informal guidance and mentorship to graduate students in other labs and departments; to junior faculty, as they set up new imaging labs; and to senior faculty, as they embark on their first neuroimaging projects. He has also personally trained a half dozen full-time postbaccalaureate research assistants and dozens of undergraduate research assistants.
Conclusion. In sum, Dr. Jason Smith is an outstanding Research Scientist and has played a crucial role in our lab’s success and that of many other faculty and trainees on and off campus. He’s an exceptional contributor and one of the behind-the-scenes heroes of the college. Congrats on this well-deserved recognition!