Inside the MIND Lab

The first hurdle of the night happens early. Gloriamar Esteves’s hair will be braided, she is told, but only on the right side. Her eyes widen in alarm. 

Student researcher Kris Cheaye ’26J is quick to offer reassurance. 

“But after that, I can finish!” Cheaye exclaims, noting that the visitor’s hair will end up braided on both sides. Esteves, a recent alum from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, looks relieved and Cheaye laughs. “If you’ve got to sit still for an hour and get your hair braided, you might as well look good.” 

The two students are in the Mind in Development (MIND) Lab, a small suite of rooms right off the main entrance to Burton Hall. It’s already late on a Thursday night, but ahead of them is at least an hour of hair braiding and then another half hour or so of testing equipment. 

Lab Manager Maddie Scricco bustles around, helping Cheaye prep the sensor-covered cap that will go on Esteves’s head, the computers that will measure the input from her scalp, and a list of test questions. A comb and tubes of hair conditioner sit on a table to the side. 

Esteves is taking part in a new experimental protocol, one that Smith students and researchers—along with their partners at the University of Maryland—hope might help solve a long-held problem in their area of research: What do you do when the equipment doesn’t work with your body? 

This project, officially known as Braiding for Research Access, Inclusivity, and Diversity in Science (and yes, the acronym is BRAIDS), is the most recent solution for a historic problem in the field. As Professor and MIND Lab Director Maya Rosen notes, she first encountered the issue when she started working with a type of research that used caps to measure brain activity. 

Earlier in her career, Rosen had explored the development of children’s brains using MRI and functional MRI (fMRI). These scans show what part of the brain is the most active at any given moment by measuring blood flow. The scans are done in the most TV medical drama way: Participants slide into a big white tube to be scanned by powerful magnets. 

An MRI machine is enormously powerful, but it’s also enormously expensive to own and operate—and for a college research lab, such a machine is out of reach. Interested in other options, Rosen made the switch from fMRI to functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which had the advantage of similarly gathering data via blood flow in the brain, but through a simple cap covered in small laser lights. 

“It’s a promising way of getting at neural activity,” says Rosen. “I started thinking that that might be a good tool to use in the future, especially with young kids. It’s a lot cheaper and easier for students to use.” 

fNIRS is a neuroimaging tool. In order for it to work, the optodes—sensors that measure with light—have to make scalp contact. As she explored the new option, Rosen heard from a colleague that, since the cap needed to be close to the scalp, certain hair textures wouldn’t work with the optodes. Hair that was kinky, curly, or coiled often prevented the caps from sitting close enough to get an accurate reading. 

“[I was told] ‘Oh yeah, hair texture is a problem, so you just can’t include people who have Afro-textured hair,’” recalls Rosen. “And I was like, ‘Well, that seems bad.’”
 

Thanks to a Zoom conference in 2020 with the then-newly formed Black In Neuro, which would become an official nonprofit in 2021, Rosen learned more about the historically exclusionary practices in neuroimaging research. She was taken aback to hear that even when a diverse group of subjects was included in the studies, if hair texture meant the caps didn’t fit properly (with Black participants in particular), their data would be categorized as poor and thrown out, ultimately skewing the results. 

To counter the issue, one Black In Neuro researcher working with electroencephalograms (EEGs)—which measure electrical signals in the brain using caps similar to fNIRS—shared her inventive solution: hair braiding. 

“They were talking about partnering with hairstylists in their local area to figure out ways to braid hair so that they could actually get access to the scalp and still be respectful of the hair,” says Rosen. “My takeaway from it was that you need somebody very well trained, obviously. And the problem can be solved.” 

Rosen started at Smith in July 2022 and opened her new space, the MIND Lab, in January 2023. In May, as she and her students started collecting research data, Rosen noticed a flyer for a student who had a side business in hair braiding: Glory Divine Yougang Tahon ’26. 

Tahon, a computer science major, helped the lab researchers create and test hair-braiding techniques. Tahon says the main difference between regular braiding and braiding for a lab setting lies “in the balance between beauty and effectiveness.” To ensure a strong connection with the scalp, she had to find a pattern that made the cap as effective as possible. 

“This definitely required a lot of trial and error, but once we had a clear pattern, I focused on making it a bit more beautiful,” she says. “I would also say that it takes the braider to truly understand the concept, grasp the vision, and run with it. Overall, it was a great experience.” 

As an informal test, Rosen and her team recruited student participants to try out the new technique. The difference was shocking: Braided hair meant that data went from being completely unusable to easily readable. The monitor used a stoplight-type system of colors that made the difference particularly stark visually. 

“It’s going from almost all red to greens and yellows,” notes Rosen. 

When Rosen hired Kris Cheaye in her lab, the student researcher worked with Tahon to perfect the hair-braiding techniques. Cheaye wrote up a hair-braiding protocol and made an instructional video, so participants could understand the process. Cheaye, who learned hair braiding early on as part of their Liberian heritage, said the study was the perfect intersection of their neuroscience major and Africana Studies minor. 

“I’ve been braiding since I was in middle school,” Cheaye says. “So it was definitely a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this will be cool.’ I was so happy I got to bring my skills into my science lab. I would never think I’d need it for this.” 

Even as the MIND Lab was looking at early results, Rosen learned that a colleague at the University of Maryland was testing similar hair-braiding efforts for fNIRS caps. In the fall of 2024, the students and researchers from both labs met to figure out a more formal collaboration. Rosen's lab would test the University of Maryland's new protocol of braiding half of the hair on participants’ heads and leaving half loose. Participants at Smith would then do additional tasks that involved motion—such as having a conversation or walking—to measure both the signal and any interference the caps collected. 

Collaborating with the University of Maryland allows the researchers to gather data from two different braiders in two different locations and with two different participant populations. “It’s even more compelling to show we can get the same results across different labs,” says Rosen. 

According to Rosen, down the line the plan is to turn this research into a published academic paper. “Then this will be something that more groups can cite; something official to say, this is why we did hair braiding.’” 

It’s not a perfect solution; braiding sessions extend the time that participants are in the lab by 45 minutes to an hour. Even when participants receive extra compensation, Rosen says the amount of extra time is still an issue. 

Rosen also hopes that by raising awareness around the issue, companies who create fNIRS equipment will eventually develop caps that solve the problem entirely. As she notes, why should people whose hair is a certain texture have to spend up to two extra hours in the lab? “We are already convinced that it works, so we use it,” says Rosen. “But this is officially showing other folks.” 

“I think it’s a big step in the right direction,” agrees Cheaye. “Being able to take steps to say we’re here for you and you can be comfortable in our study—that is definitely building a bridge that was broken.”