Tato Sokhadze, PhD, BCN, President of FNNR
Our foundation will celebrate its 12th year anniversary during the Orlando ISNR conference. We continue our efforts to promote research and clinical applications in neurofeedback, neuromodulation and qEEG areas. We pursue various forms of fundraising including ISNR members’ donations, vendors’ donations, named mini-grant and student travelship sponsorship, legacy donations, publishing, fundraising dinners, and, of course, our annual silent auctions.
After reorganization last year, we changed address of headquarters, hired new administrative coordinator and publishing coordinator, opted in new board members and advisors to became more focused on our primary activities such as fundraising (silent auction, donation solicitation, bequest, etc.), funding students’ mini-grants (we have now 2 mini-grant cycles every year), and extended out book publishing program. We published 2 new books in 2019: a book titled Autism Spectrum Disorders: Neurofeedback, Neuromodulation and Sensory Integration Approaches edited by Tato Sokhadze and Manuel Casanova and Becoming Certified in Neurofeedback: A Guide to the Neurofeedback Mentoring Process for Mentors and Mentees by Robert Longo and Richard Soutar. New instruction for preparation and publishing books with us were prepared by our publishing coordinator Megan Stevens and they provide very detailed guide for the prospective authors. One of the new titles expected to be published this year is the 2nd edition of Neurofeedback: The Non-Invasive Alternative by a South Africa-based author Helena Bester. Other books in preparation are anticipated to be in production soon including 2nd edition of Doing Neurofeedback, two more booklets from the series by Robert Longo and his colleagues, a book focused on CPT codes by Mark Trullinger and Joy Lunt and more. We continue receiving royalties from the books donated by the authors to our foundation and for our books translated in foreign languages.
The annual ISNR conference this year is planned for the middle of June rather than in Fall. This required some corrections and adjustments in our timelines. In particular, we will be announcing a new cycle of the call for the FNNR mini-grants in the first week of March with deadline of the proposal submissions in the first week of May. We will announce call for nominations for the Brainmaster’s Joe Kamiya First-Person Science Award also early in March with May 7 deadline. We will be introducing this year as well a new conference $300 travelship award named after Gerald Gluck for a student presenting at the annual meeting. Award winner will be selected by our program committee based on a merit of presentation. We plan to continue supporting every students presenting at the conference with $100 travelship as we have been doing it already for several years. We plan to restore a joint FNNR-FERB grant to support projects of student research studies that include both EEG and autonomic measures in neurotherapy. We continue fundraising for a new named award for research aimed at prevention of cognitive decline in elderly—Tom Budzynski award—to recognize his legacy, as we already have part of the funds donated for this purpose by the MindPlace company.
We mourn the loss of our Board member Marcie Zinn who passed away on December 28, 2019. We will miss her very much, she was a valuable member and a good friend. There were some recent changes on our Board and Advisory membership. We are proud to announce that James Evans joined our foundation as an advisory board member and we expect to use his outstanding editorial experience in our book publishing efforts. John Nash stepped down as a Vice-President of the FNNR and we are considering candidates for this currently vacant Board position.
Our silent auction was very successful last year and we are grateful to our donors and bidders. We will start soliciting donations to our annual silent auction in April (after AAPB’s meeting) and we count on support of the ISNR membership and vendors. Our activities depend on your support and donations to auction and we encourage you to donate items and to bid during the conference. We appreciate support of our efforts by the ISNR Board of Directors and value contributions of our supporters and donors. Please continue supporting our mission to promote neurofeedback and neuromodulation research. Visit our website www.thefnnr.org for more information about our activities.