Have you ever wanted to ask a presidential candidate a question? Not just a typical campaign question on plans to create jobs or the economy, but a specific question on anything that you'd like?

Students in professor Kiron Skinner's class - International Relations and Politics majors, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development minors, and the research associates of the Center for International Relations and Politics (CIRP) - had exactly that opportunity four times over, with special question and answer sessions with former Speaker of the House and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and two former congresswomen.

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Related: Kiron Skinner Joins Newt Gingrich's Campaign as a National Security Advisor 

Learning and Behavior: How Instruction Influences Experience 

Until now, most psychology and neural imaging research have focused on how humans learn behavior through trial and error.

However, neuroscientists Matthew M. Walsh and John R. Anderson have found that this view is incomplete.

In their study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Walsh and Anderson show how the brain uses both instruction and experience to select actions.

This identification of separate neural systems that control behavior also suggests that damage to one may not impair the other.

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Terrance Hayes Appointed to President Obama's National Student Poets Program

Award-winning poet and English Professor Terrance Hayes has been chosen to serve as a panelist for President Barack Obama's new National Student Poets Program (NSPP), the country's highest honor for young poets presenting original work. 

Hayes is one of four literary leaders who will judge students who received a National Scholastic Art & Writing Award for poetry. Five high school students will be selected to serve for a year as national poetry ambassadors.

Hayes also has been selected as a 2011 United States Artist (USA) Fellow in Literature. Each year, USA honors 50 of the nation's finest artists with fellowship awards of $50,000. Previous USA Fellows include visual artist Kara Walker, poet Martín Espada, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith and choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones. In the 2011 literature class, Hayes joins former and current MacArthur Fellowship winners Campbell McGrath and A. E. Stallings.

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Dan Schultz received a B.S. in Information Systems in 2009 and is currently a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, studying in the Information Ecology Group and the Center for Civic Media.  

At the beginning of November 2011, he was announced as one of five Knight-Mozilla News Technology Fellows that will help newsrooms solve real technology problems.  

Schultz will be embedded in the Boston Globe's newsroom for ten months. He will blog regularly about what he's working on and learning and release the code he creates into the open-source and journalism communities - because the goal of the fellowship is to make tools that benefit all of journalism and beyond.

More Dietrich College News 

Dietrich College Multimedia 

Find out what's going on with Dietrich College alumni, such as Ellen Frank (HS'67), David Ben Leavitt (HS'69), Robert Szymczak (HS'80), LeAnn Neal Reilly (HS'92), Michael Shaw (HS'07) and Yulin Kuang (HS'12).