Neurosalience

In this episode, it's our pleasure to host Jack Wells who is a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the University College London Center for Advanced Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Wells received his Ph.D. in MRI in the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering at  at University College London in 2010, and since he began his scientific career, he's been working at the interface of MRI methodology and neurophysiology - focusing on understanding the Cerebral Spinal Fluid dynamics and how they may relate to the Glymphatic system. He and his colleagues have been among the leaders in using MRI to image and characterize the glymphatic system as well as the  brain - cerebrospinal fluid barrier. The glymphatic system is hypothesized to be the paravascular mechanism by which CSF is washed through brain tissue - typically during sleep - clearing out metabolic waste. It is an incompletely understood yet potentially profoundly important system where its dysfunction  may be at the root of  disorders that include Alzheimer's disease. In this wonderful conversation we hear all about Jack's and others' work imaging and understanding the hydrodynamics and spatial organization of neurofluids in the brain. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

If you are interested in working with Nathan, he is currently recruiting for a postdoc! Send your CV to lbc.spreng@gmail.com Today our guest is Nathan Spreng. Dr. Spreng is the James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery and Director of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University. As an undergraduate, Dr. Spreng was initially interested in pursuing a major in poetry until he took a psychology class that sparked his interest in the brain. He received Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Toronto in Brian Levine's lab, and post docs with Cheryl Grady at the University of Toronto and Dan Schacter at Harvard. After about 5 years as an assistant professor at Cornell University, he moved to McGill University. Throughout his career Dr. Spreng has been using fMRI to reveal subtle yet repeatable large-scale brain networks as they relate attention, memory, cognitive control, and social cognition. He has also helped to elucidate the central role that the default network plays in self-generated thought, and in how it dynamically interacts with multiple systems in the brain. In this episode Peter and Nathan have a far reaching conversation about his work and what it implies, covering his study of age dependence of resting state hippocampal-linked network ensembles, how to move from mapping networks to modeling and understanding mechanisms, the many possible clinical implications of his work, current understanding of Alzheimer's disease, our mutual appreciation for multi-echo EPI, his data release paper of a large multi-echo EPI and structural MRI data set, and much more. Enjoy listening! Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Omer Faruk Gulban

It is our great pleasure and deep honor to host Dr. Marsel Mesulam who is a giant in the field of Neurology and one of founders of OHBM. Dr. Mesulam is Chief of Behavioral Neurology and the Ruth Dunbar Davee Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Professor of Behavioral Neurology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.Dr. Mesulam received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1972, and in 1976 completed residencies at Boston City Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. After a 1 year postdoc at Harvard University he began his tenure in Chicago at Northwestern. Dr. Mesulam's work has been both prodigious and impactful over the years, as his almost 1000 papers have been cited over 140 thousand times. He has written the seminal book, Principles of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, and has produced many landmark papers - a few of which we'll discuss in the podcast. One paper that we consider a masterpiece was published in Brain in 1998 and titled From Sensation to Cognition. This can be considered as a required reading for everyone in the field of brain mapping as it lays out so concisely and eloquently, a breathtaking perspective of the structure and functional organization of the human brain. Dr. Mesulam's research is extremely broad and diverse, having impacted such areas as neural networks and functional imaging, Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), Cholinergic Pathways, Acetylcholinesterase Studies, Cognitive Psychology, Neurology, and Neuropsychiatry. He also developed, early in his career, a neuronal marker, Tetramethyl benzidine, that profoundly impacted research in this area. In this inspiring conversation, Peter and Marsel discuss his early career and what was important for his success, delve into research culture and the value of opportunistic research, and the value of having the freedom and resources to try many things and rapidly change directions that follow interesting leads. They also discuss some of the exciting early days of Neuroimaging and OHBM. Lastly, we go into some of his current research on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and the study of temporal pole disease as a window to temporal pole functional significance. We hope that you enjoy this conversation. Episode producers:Alfie WearnOmer Faruk Gulban

Dr. Rosenberg received her Ph.D. from the department of Psychology at Yale University, where she also carried out her post doc. In 2019, she started as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago and is a member of the Chicago Neuroscience Institute.  She has been pioneering the use of connectome-based predictive modeling to capture individual differences in the ability to sustain attention. Attention is fundamental to just about everything that we experience and do and how we navigate the world. It varies over time and each person has different abilities to maintain it. Monica has developed and used extensively a task known as gradCPT, an easy at first but hard to sustain, continuous attention task that allows moment to moment assessment of sustained attention. She has found two networks that characterize high attention vs lower attention, and these have been powerful for characterizing individuals ability to sustain attention. It's also been useful for characterizing differences in such attention-related skills such as reading comprehension.  She's been delving further into both fMRI methodology and the nuances of attention ever since. In this conversation we talk about her career development, the great environment at Yale, the development of her exciting and impactful  fMRI-based human attention research. We hope you enjoy the conversation! Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban

Exploring deep sampling of fMRI data with Dr. Evan Gordon, uncovering unique connectivity patterns and effector-specific regions in the motor cortex. Delving into advancements in individual brain mapping and variances in neural networks. Discussing brain evolution, motor cortex expansion, and the ongoing need for detailed brain mapping.

Today, our guest is Shella Keilholz. Dr. Keilholz received her Bachelor's in Physics from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1997, and her PhD in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia in 2004. She went on to a do a post-doc at NIH in Dr. Alan Koretsky's lab and in 2004 joined the department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University as a faculty member. She is now a full professor at Emory University and also closely affiliated with Georgia Tech. Since around 2008 she has been uncovering new spatial and temporal patterns in resting state fMRI. She was the first to identify spatial propagation of wave-like behavior in the resting state time series and in 2011 coined the term quasi-periodic patterns (QPP) to describe whole brain networks that dominate much of the resting state signal. Recently, she and others have described three such patterns that account for most of the variance. Here we not only talk about her career but also delve into how these quasi-periodic patterns mesh with the current landscape of diverse features of resting state fMRI that continue to be found. She has shown that these patterns may have a central driver and may relate to such things as vasomotion, global signal, arousal state, and attention. In general, there is much more information from basic neurophysiology to cognition that remains to be derived from resting state fMRI, and Shella is among those leading the effort. This was an incredibly stimulating and fun discission. We hope you enjoy it! Episode producers:Omer Faruk Gulban Jeff Mentch

Today, we’re excited to have Alex Huth on the podcast. Alex is one of the more creative and insightful people in the field of brain imaging today as he has been forging new ground using naturalistic stimuli and voxelwise models to create intricate maps of semantic features across large swaths of the brain. His seminal 2016 paper in Nature brought his approach to prominence: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17637 Here, Alex shares insights on the value of naturalistic stimuli on fMRI research and updates us on our current capabilities to decode brain activity. During this conversation Alex highlights an amazing tool to view semantic maps in the brain, which can be found here: https://gallantlab.org/viewer-huth-2016/ Alex received his bachelor’s in engineering and applied science from Cal Tec, where he was also working as an undergraduate researcher in Christoff Koch's lab. He continued on, receiving his Ph.D. in 2013 from University of California Berkeley, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, under the guidance of Dr.'s Christof Koch and Jack Gallant. He went on to do his post doc in the Gallant lab and finally moved to the University of Austin in 2017, where he is an assistant professor in computer science and neuroscience: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~huth/

Today, our guest is Dr. Andrew Jahn. Those of you learning MRI and fMRI analysis - which realistically, should be pretty much all of us - may already know about the amazing resources that he is prodigiously producing online. Starting with "Andy's Brain Blog" in 2012, expanding to videos (over 300 of them), and now his current project, "Andy's Brain Book", Dr. Jahn has been steadily creating a standard and a go-to resource for all of us to learn the nuts and bolts as well as concepts and nuances of processing our data. Dr. Jahn received his Bachelors in Psychology in 2008 from Carleton College, and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Indiana University in 2015. He did a postdoc at the Haskins Laboratories at Yale University, and is now a professor at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. There he has been given the freedom to expand his extremely valuable teaching resources. In this podcast we discuss how he got started in this, how perhaps failing to get a post-undergraduate position at the NIH started him down this path. We discuss the educational resources that he has been producing, and how he draws upon luminaries from Jaque Barzun to Dave Berry for inspiration. We also discuss the wider issue of education in neuroimaging - what can be taught and what cannot and have an open-ended conversation on the future of neuroimaging as well as some of his own planned future projects. This was a truly fun and enlightening discussion! We hope you enjoy it!  Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Omer Faruk Gulban Brain Art Artist: Laura Bundesen Title: Colors of hope

Dr. Russ Poldrack, influential in fMRI and cognitive neuroscience, discusses paradigm shifts in fMRI best practices and challenges in brain imaging. Topics include the importance of replicability, the growth of OpenNURO for data sharing, predicting task information, AI advancements in cognitive function, the potential of GPT-3 for fMRI analysis, issues in research design, and analyzing individual subjects in fMRI. The future of fMRI and efforts to generate large datasets and bridge human-animal models using AI are also discussed.

Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) 2023 live podcast session hosted by Alfie Wearn on site during the conference. In this episode, our guests Ana Luísa Pinho, Enrico Amico, Tim Laumann, and Emily Finn discuss mapping individual differences in the human brain. Enjoy listening! Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Omer Faruk Gulban Jeff Mentch