Neurosalience #S2E8 with Xavier Castellanos - Probing brain development with fMRI

Dr. Xavier Castellanos is a psychiatrist and a highly influential scientist who has been working in neuroimaging for over 20 years towards the goal of leveraging MRI, fMRI and other approaches to better understand and treat children and adults with psychiatric disorders.

Xavier Castellanos studied Chomskian linguistics at Vassar College, experimental psychology at the University of New Orleans, and medicine at Louisiana State University in Shreveport - receiving his M.D. in 1986. He was in the first cohort of “triple board” residents (combined training in pediatrics, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry) at the University of Kentucky. In 1991, he conducted child psychiatry research at the National Institute of Mental Health under the supervision of Judy Rapaport. In 2001, he moved to New York University, where he is now an endowed Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Professor of Radiology and Neuroscience at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has also been a research psychiatrist at the Nathan Kline Institute since 2006, with a focus on using intrinsic functional connectivity-based approaches in human and translational studies. He was an early advocate of using resting state fMRI and of the creation of consortium-driven databases.

Dr. Castelanos is one of the most impactful clinical neuroscientists in brain mapping with an h-index of 124 and over 70K citations. He is a highly collaborative and an outstanding mentor, having won the inaugural OHBM Mentor Award last year.

Discussion:

Here Dr. Castellanos discusses fascinating career development from his early years to his formative decade at the NIH, and finally to his current position at NYU and Nathan Kline. He discusses his embrace of neuroimaging and fMRI towards studying psychiatric disorders and developmental trajectories and expresses a skepticism with the idea that fMRI will reveal clinically useful biomarkers. That said, he emphasizes that fMRI is deeply useful for understanding the organization of the brain in healthy subjects and those with psychiatric disorders.