OHBM 2022 Featured Speakers | Organization for Human Brain Mapping

Annual Meeting - Featured Speakers

Dr. Lozano is a neurosurgeon and University Professor at the University of Toronto. He is best known for his work in the field of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and Magnetic Resonance-guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS). His team has mapped cortical and subcortical circuits in the human brain and has advanced novel treatments for Parkinson’s disease and for depression, dystonia, anorexia, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Lozano has over 750 publications and serves on the boards of several international organizations. He has trained over 70 international post-doctoral fellows. He has received a number of honors including Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Sevilla, the Olivecrona Medal, the Pioneer in Medicine Award and the Dandy Medal. He has been elected to the Royal Society of Canada, has received the Order of Spain and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Dr. Sarah Genon leads the lab Cognitive Neuroinformatics at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Brain and Behaviour (INM-7) at the Forschungszentrum Julich (Germany). She is also a Professor from the DFG-Heisenberg-Programm at the Institute for Systems Neuroscience of the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf.

Ole Jensen received his MSc degree in Electrical engineering in 1993 from the Technical University of Denmark. He pursued his doctoral research at Brandeis University in the United States under the supervision of Professor John E. Lisman. In 1998 he obtained his Ph.D degree in neuroscience specializing in computational modelling of oscillatory networks. As a postdoctoral fellow, he applied magnetoencephalography (MEG) to address questions on brain dynamics and human cognition at the Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology. In 2002 he was employed as head of the MEG laboratory at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior. He was appointed professor in 2013 at the Faculty of Science, Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2016 he started a new position as professor in translational neuroscience at the University of Birmingham where he is co-director of the Centre for Human Brain Health. Jensen's work focuses on linking oscillatory brain activity to cognition using a combination of methodological approaches. For this work, he received The Joseph Chamberlain Award for Academic Advancement at the University of Birmingham (2018). He is in the top 1% for citations in Neuroscience & Behavioural Science/Cross-Field.

Dr. Yina Ma is currently the Director of Social & Affective NeuroPharmacology (SANP) Lab and Principle Investigator in State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University. She obtained her Ph.D degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at Peking University, and was a Research Scientist at Dartmouth College and Johns Hopkins University. Integrating neuroscience techniques (fMRI, fNIRS, sEEG), pharmacological challenge, and computational modeling, her research group aims to elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social decision-making during interpersonal and intergroup interactions, and to reveal how the mechanisms are altered. These findings have been published on high-profile journals such as Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Molecular Psychiatry, Brain Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cerebral Cortex, Neuropsychopharmacology, British Journal of Psychiatry, etc. She is an elected member of the Executive Committee at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, and currently serving as Associate Editor for Biological Psychology and the editorial boards of Emotion, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, etc. The long-term goals of the SANP lab are to uncover the central neurobiological determinants of human social behaviors, and to integrate its empirical findings with public mental health issues to promote well-being and social functioning.

Lab website: https://mylab.bnu.edu.cn/

Professor Janaina Mourao-Miranda leads the Machine Learning and Neuroimaging Lab at the Centre for Medical Imaging Computing (CMIC) in the Computer Science Department, University College London (UCL). She obtained her first degree in Electronic Engineering at Federal University of Para (Brazil) in 1995. She then pursued an MSc in Computer Science and a Ph.D in Neuroscience at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), completing in 2002. After her Ph.D, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Neural Computation at Siemens, Munich, Germany (2003-2005) and at the Institute of Psychiatry , King's College London, UK (2005-2009). She was a pioneer of the application of machine learning methods to neuroimaging analyses, addressing both cognitive and clinical neuroscience questions. In 2009 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship to set up her independent research group at UCL and, in 2013, she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. Since 2011, she has led the development of open source Pattern Recognition for Neuroimaging toolbox (PRoNTo), which has been used by researchers from many different institutions and countries and has been cited in more than 350 publications. Her current research focuses on developing novel machine learning models to investigate complex relationships between neuroimaging data and multidimensional descriptions of mental health disorders, in particular, for improving, understanding, diagnosis, and prognosis.

Jonathan R. Polimeni, Ph.D is an Assistant Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School, Associate Investigator at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Affiliated Faculty in the Division of Health Sciences and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Director of Ultrahigh-Field Imaging at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. His graduate training was in electrical engineering and computational neuroscience, and his postdoctoral training was in MRI physics and fMRI acquisition. He leads the High-Resolution and Ultra-High-Field Functional Imaging Laboratory within the MR Physics and Instrumentation Group at the Martinos Center. His laboratory focuses on developing new technologies for high-resolution fMRI, on modeling how the brain's vascular anatomy and physiology shape the fMRI signals, and on studying of the functional architecture of the human visual cortex at the level of cortical columns and layers. He is currently the principal investigator on several NIH grants, including a multi-institutional project funded by the BRAIN Initiative on understanding the relationship of human fMRI data to the underlying neuronal activity.

Anastasia Yendiki is Associate Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She received her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she worked on inverse problems in tomographic image reconstruction. She then came to the Martinos Center to learn about fMRI, but saw a tractography image on her first day and changed her mind. As a postdoc, she developed TRACULA, the diffusion tractography toolbox in the FreeSurfer software package. Her current interests are in obtaining accurate models of white-matter fiber bundles from microscopy techniques, such as anatomic tracing and optical imaging, developing methods that can take advantage of these post mortem models to infer connectional anatomy from in vivo diffusion MRI, and one day getting good at flamenco guitar.

Andrew Zalesky is Associate Professor in Engineering and Medicine at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He completed his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at the same institute in 2007. Adopting an engineering mindset to study the brain has enabled Dr. Zalesky to innovate novel methods and models to understand the network organization of the human connectome in health and disease. He established one of the most widely used tools for performing statistical inference on connectomes, co-authored the first textbook on brain network analysis and led development of the Melbourne Subcortex Atlas. Dr. Zalesky is ranked among the top-1% of researchers worldwide, according to citations to his work (2018-2021) and he was recently voted by his peers as one of Australia's most innovative biomedical engineers. He currently holds a Senior Research Fellowship from the Australian National Medical and Health Research Council and serves as an Associate Editor for Network Neuroscience, Brain Topography and Neuroimage Clinical.

Dr. Juan Helen Zhou is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Sleep and Cognition, and the Deputy Director at: Centre for Translational Magnetic Resonance Research, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS. Her laboratory studies selective brain network-based vulnerability in neuropsychiatric disorders using multimodal neuroimaging and computational approaches. She received her Ph.D from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She did her multiple post-doctoral training at the Memory and Aging Centre, University of California, San Francisco, Computational Biology Program at Singapore-MIT Alliance, and Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University before joining Duke-NUS Medical School as a faculty member. Helen has also served as a Council member and Program Committee member of OHBM. She also serves on the advisory board of Cell Reports Medicine and as an editor of Human Brain Mapping, Elife, and Communications Biology.