Advisors

Peter Basser, Ph.D. - NICHD

Dr. Basser is Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health, Director of the Program on Pediatric Imaging and Tissue Sciences, and Chief of the Section on Tissue Biophysics and Biomimetics at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Dr. Basser and his research team are primarily known  for the invention, development, and clinical implementation of MR diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and for explaining the physical basis of magnetic stimulation of nerve fibers, development, and clinical implementation of MR diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and for explaining the physical basis of magnetic stimulation of nerve fibers.


Ed Bullmore, FMedSci - University of Cambridge

Dr. Bullmore is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. His expertise is in functional and structural neuroimaging, mostly MRI, of normal cognitive functions, effects of psychopharmacological agents on brain function, and neuropsychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, autism, depression). He has a methodological focus on neurophysiological time series analysis, complex networks, wavelets and fractals and works with cognitive and neuroimaging techniques as new tools for CNS drug discovery and development.

Alan Evans, Ph.D. - MNI at McGill University

Dr. Evans is the James McGill Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering at McGill University based at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Dr. Evans heads the data coordinating center for two large NIH-funded multi-center MRI studies of normal pediatric development and research of autism in infants. These projects provide a web-accessible reference database of normal and autistic maturation, both neuroanatomical and behavioral, for studies of normal and abnormal brain development.

The methodologies developed for those projects, most notably (i) a web-based imaging/behavioral database, (ii) automated MRI segmentation pipelines, and (iii) brain-behavior correlation analyses for voxel-based (volumetric) or vertex-based (surface) data, are being used in a series of international collaborations on abnormal pediatric development and Alzheimer's disease. He has also developed a national grid-computing network for brain image analysis known as CBRAIN. His current research interest is graph theoretical network modeling of structural connectivity implied by cortical morphology correlation analysis.

Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D. - UC Santa Barbara

Dr. Gazzaniga is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is well known for initiating human split-brain research and advances in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. He has published many books accessible to a lay audience, such as The Ethical Brain and Human which, along with his participation in the public television specials The Brain and The Mind, have been instrumental in making information about brain function generally accessible.

His many scholarly publications include the landmark 1995 book for MIT Press, The Cognitive Neurosciences, now in its fourth edition, which is recognized as the sourcebook for the field. He is an advisor to various institutes involved in brain research, and was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

David Glahn, Ph.D. - Yale University

Dr. Glahn is Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. His research focuses on elucidating the neurobiological and genetic roots of major mental illnesses through the integration of cognitive neuropsychological, functional and structural neuroimaging, and behavioral and molecular genetic approaches. His laboratory develops quantitative measures of brain structure and function that are sensitive to genetic risk for affective and psychotic illnesses and applies these measures in large-scale genetics studies.

Dr. Glahn leads three major NIH funded studies designed to identify genes influencing brain anatomy, physiology and neurocognition in randomly ascertained families or in individuals with bipolar disorder and their well siblings.

Michael Hawrylycz, Ph.D. - Allen Institute for Brain Science

Dr. Hawrylycz is Senior Director of Data Analysis and Annotation at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He is an expert in applied mathematics and computer science areas and has worked on addressing challenges in consumer and investment finance, electrical engineering and image processing, and computational biology and genomics. He has played a lead role in developing the informatics infrastructure for the Allen Human Brain Atlas.

Jüergen Hennig, Ph.D. - UMC Freiburg

Dr. Hennig is Professor of Medical Physics and co-chairman and scientific director of the Dept. of Radiology at the University Medical Center Freiburg. He is the leader of the advanced Functional Brain Imaging Group, working in the fields of sequences and methods development for the investigation of neuronal activations (fMRI, MREG) and spectroscopy by means of magnetic resonance imaging.

Under his leadership, the Freiburg MR research group has implemented new ideas and concepts for the use of MRI in a broad spectrum of applications. The core of their development work has been in the establishment of fast and ultra-fast MRI, new technological developments for MR, the functional imaging of brain and heart, MR in translational research in oncology, molecular imaging for the development of highly selective contrast agents, and in the use of MRI for the development and testing of new drugs.

Geoff Parker, Ph.D. - University of Manchester

Dr. Parker is Professor and Director of the Biomedical Imaging Institute at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on quantitative MRI characterization of neural and other tissue microstructure and physiology, as well as an active research portfolio focusing on the development of diffusion MRI tractography methods and their application to a range of conditions. He leads a research group of approximately 20 research staff and doctoral students.


Russell Poldrack, Ph.D. - UT Austin

Dr. Poldrack is Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology and Director of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary interest is in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and memory, decision making, and executive function, using neuroimaging as the primary method to examine these questions. Recent work has focused on the neural systems that support flexible and rapid inhibition of ongoing behavior, and their role in adaptive behavior and decision making.

Dr. Poldrack is also involved in the development of informatics tools to support the mapping of cognitive function to neural systems, primarily through the Cognitive Atlas project. A recent interest is in the application of statistical learning and network analysis methods to the analysis of fMRI data and the prediction of behavior from neuroimaging signals. Dr. Poldrack is also interested in conceptual issues regarding the role of neuroimaging in cognitive neuroscience and the kinds of inferences that neuroimaging data can support.

Riitta Salmelin, Ph.D. - Aalto University

Dr. Salmelin is Academy Professor in the Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory at Aalto University in Finland, where she heads the Imaging Language group. Her research focuses on human brain function, using non-invasive brain imaging methods, particularly magnetoencephalography. Dr. Salmelin and her group create versatile but controlled experimental environments for systems neuroscience research and develop analysis methods in direct interplay with their neuroscientific questions. To combine functional and structural information, the group integrates MEG data with the subject's magnetic resonance images and functional magnetic resonance imaging.