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Talairach Lecture

 

                  


Leah Krubitzer, PhD    

Leah Krubitzer is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis.  She received a BS at Penn State University in Communication Disorders and a PhD in Psychology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville Tennessee. Her graduate work, under the mentorship of Dr. Jon Kaas focused on the evolution of visual cortex in primates.  Her interest in the evolution of the neocortex was extended in her postdoctoral work at the University of Queensland, Australia to include a variety of mammals such as monotremes and marsupials.  While in Australia she performed comparative analysis on the neocortex of a variety of different species and to date has worked on the brains of over 45 different mammals.  Her current research focuses on the impact of early experience on the cortical phenotype, and she specifically examines the effects of the sensory environment on the development of connections, functional organization and behavior and seeks to understand how cultural impacts brain development.  She also examines the evolution of sensory motor networks involved in manual dexterity, reaching and grasping in mammals.  She received a MacArthur award for her work on evolution.

Combinatorial Creatures:  Cortical Plasticity Within and Across Lifetimes
I will present comparative and developmental data to show that large phenotypic changes to cortical organization, connectivity and function occurs over the long time scale of evolution and over the shorter time scale of a lifetime.  We contend that a remarkable adaptation of the human brain is its capacity to develop a neocortex that matches the environmental context in which it develops allowing cultural evolution to impact brain development.

 

 Keynote Lectures

 



Dora Hermes, PhD     

Dr. Hermes is an assistant professor at the Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, and head of the Multimodal Neuroimaging Laboratory. She is a human systems neuroscientist who studies multimodal signals measured in the living human brain in order to identify biomarkers of neurological diseases and develop neuroprosthetics to interface with the brain
 

Integrating mesoscale human brain measurements in the human visual pathways
There are many ways to measure the human brain, with each measurement highlighting a different aspect of brain function. Intracranial EEG recording, with electrodes implanted in the human brain for clinical purposes, have many different characteristics, such as narrowband rhythms or spectrally broadband motifs. These mesoscale field potentials measure the aggregate signals from neuronal populations and there are many existing theories on the role of different signal properties in visual processing. I will discuss how the integration of fMRI and field potential measurements in combination with computational modeling, can contribute to our understanding of typical and pathological processing in the human visual pathways.

 



Ted Satterthwaite, MD     

Ted is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Ted completed medical and graduate training at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a student of Randy L. Buckner. Subsequently, he was a psychiatry resident and a neuropsychiatry fellow at Penn, under the mentorship of Raquel E. Gur. He joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry in 2014, and has served as the Director of Imaging Analytics of the Brain Behavior Laboratory from 2015-2019. Since 2019, he has directed the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center (PennLINC). His research uses large-scale multi-modal neuroimaging data to describe both normal and abnormal patterns of brain development in youth.

Neurodevelopment of the Association Cortices: Normative Patterns and Implications for Psychopathology
During childhood and adolescence, cortical development progresses from lower-order unimodal cortices to higher-order association cortices subserving complex cognitive, socioemotional, and mentalizing functions. This session presents recent work that illustrates how this protracted developmental program endows the brain’s association cortices with unique functional properties, but also leaves humans at risk for diverse psychopathologies.


 



Anna Wang Roe, PhD    

Dr. Anna Wang Roe (B.A. Harvard 1984, PhD MIT 1991) is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology at Zhejiang University (www.ZIINT.zju.edu.cn). She is known for her studies in visual and somatosensory processing in primate cerebral cortex and for her development of multimodal neurotechnologies.  Her doctoral work under Dr. Mriganka Sur on the 'rewired ferret' preparation is a well-known paradigm for studying brain development and plasticity. As a postdoctoral fellow under Dr. Daniel Ts'o and Torsten Wiesel (Rockefeller University, Baylor College of Medicine), she applied intrinsic signal optical imaging methods to elucidate the organization of area V2 (the second visual cortical area) of the primate. Her first faculty appointment at Department of Neurobiology at Yale University produced a series of studies in which visual illusions were used to differentiate the roles of visual areas V1 and V2. She continued her pioneering work on primate cortex at Vanderbilt University (Professor in Psychology, Radiology, and Biomedical Engineering), and developed integrated approaches (anatomy, electrophysiology, optical imaging, fMRI, optogenetics, near infrared laser stimulation, behavior) to address questions on cortical organization. Her subsequent work at Oregon National Primate Research Center at OHSU focused on postnatal development of foveal vision. She is now full-time at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China and is pursuing the project ‘Columnar Connectome in Macaque monkeys’, a project she hopes will bring understanding of the architectural basis of intelligent systems. She has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, organized numerous international conferences and symposia, and actively participates in review panels and editorships. In recognition for her contributions, she has received Sloan, Whiltehall, Packard Fellowships and has been elected member of the International Neuropsychological Symposium, as well as SPIE Fellow and AAAS Fellow.

INS-fMRI:  a method for mapping mesoscale connectomes in nonhuman primates
Connectome projects have contributed enormously to our understanding of network-based brain function. Here, we present a novel method for establishing mesoscale connectomes in the macaque monkey, which utilizes focal (~0.5mm) near infrared stimulation and ultrahigh field fMRI. Connections are acquired rapidly, at large scale, and in vivo within single individual monkeys. Results from studies of cerebral cortex and amygdala are presented. These high spatial resolution roadmaps represent a conceptual change in our understanding of the structure and function of the brain and will significantly impact brain science, precision medicine, and AI.

   



Nikolaus Weiskopf, PhD    

Nikolaus Weiskopf is Director of the Neurophysics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.  He is an expert in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods and their application to neuroimaging. Together with his collaborators, he pioneered neurofeedback based on real-time functional MRI that advanced from first experiments to clinical trials within less than 15 years. His current research focus is to develop functional and anatomical microstructure imaging using MRI, in order to study structure, function and their interplay at the microstructural level.  He received his PhD in neuroscience from the Graduate School of Neural & Behavioural Sciences and International Max Planck Research School in Tübingen, Germany. After a postdoc and holding different faculty positions at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (Institute of Neurology, University College London), he was appointed as Director at the MPI in 2015. He is Honorary Professor at the University of Leipzig and the University College London, Adjunct Professor at the Medical University of Vienna and member of the Young Academy of Europe.

Characterizing Brain Microstructure Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Towards In-Vivo Histology
Understanding the normal and diseased human brain crucially depends on reliable knowledge of its microstructure. Until recently, the microstructure could only reliably be determined using invasive methods such as ex-vivo histology. I will discuss how an interdisciplinary approach developing novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition methods, image processing methods and integrated biophysical models aims to establish non-invasive quantitative histological measures of brain tissue. Example applications of this emerging field of in-vivo histology includes the mapping of cortical myelination and superficial white matter / U-fibers. I will also address major challenges to this ambitious goal including the validation of the in-vivo histology approaches.

   
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