On Friday, the College of Communication will host Firat Soylu as the keynote speaker for the sixth annual graduate student symposium.

Soylu, a postdoctoral fellow from Northwestern University, will present “The Promises, Challenges and Future of Educational Neuroscience.”

While completing his dissertation for his doctorate at Indiana University, Soylu said he realized he had a significant interest in neuroscience, specifically its influence on the field of education. Upon completing his degree, Soylu moved to Chicago to complete his fellowship.

“After completing my Ph.D., I felt like I needed to get some more school experience,” Soylu said. “Because, although I was becoming an educational researcher, I never had any practical school experience. I had never interacted with kids. I had never interacted with teachers, and I didn’t know much about the education system in America today.”

During his three years in Chicago, Soylu interacted and trained with about 40 teachers in various Chicago schools.

In the keynote, Soylu will be addressing his belief that neuroscience and education are not individual fields that influence each other, but rather that educational neuroscience is a developing field of its own.

“In this talk I argue that even a two-way model is limiting, and that educational neuroscience should not be conceptualized as an interaction of two distinct fields,” Soylu said in his abstract for the address. “Rather, educational neuroscience should be viewed as a field in itself.”

All students are invited to attend the keynote address at 1 p.m in Graves Hall. Following the address, graduate students will present their work at student panels and poster presentations. The symposium will conclude with an award ceremony at 5 p.m.

“Anyone who is interested in neuroscience would definitely benefit from the speech,” Stacy Hughey-Surman, a professor in the College of Education, said.

In fall of 2014, Soylu will be joining the College of Education as an assistant professor of educational psychology and educational neuroscience. Although the college does not have a professor who specializes in the field of educational neuroscience at the moment, Hughey-Surman said, there are many professors who are interested in pursuing research in the field.

“It’s one of those up-and-coming areas,” she said. “There is a lot of funding available for study in this area, so I think that they decided this was something that was a necessary jump in a particular direction for our department.”