ORGANIZATION FOR HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING - BLOG

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OHBM Kids Live Review: What we can learn from 2023 event organizers

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 14:57:12 GMT

Author: Fernanda H. P. de Moraes, Kangjoo Lee, and Julia W. Y. Kam
Editors: Simon Steinkamp, Yohan Yee, Kevin Sitek, Elisa Guma

Learn about the 2023 OHBM Kids Live Review - a series interactive events engaging children with neuroscience

The 2023 OHBM Kids Live Review was the largest event since its first edition in 2021. What initially began as an opportunity for kids to review a manuscript specifically written for kids (e.g. 8–14 years old) in front of a live audience ultimately reached the broader goal of encouraging kids to pursue science while engaging in scientific outreach with a non-standard audience for researchers. In this one-hour event, a member of OHBM gives a short scientific research presentation in their native language, followed by a live Q&A session, in which children can freely ask questions about the presentation, fundamentals of neuroscience, or scientific careers. Last year’s event reached more than 1000 children around the world across 16 live sessions in 11 languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional and Simplified Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish). This year (2024), we officially renamed this series of events as the “Brain Mappers of Tomorrow” (BMT).

Dr. Kangjoo Lee, the lead of the 2023 initiative and the 2024 chair of the OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee (DIC), interviewed three local event organizers of hugely successful events. The interview aims to help future organizers of the event, to understand what worked and what could be improved, and what the advantages are of presenting their work in this format. First, we interviewed Flavie Detcheverry, who organized the in-person event during the OHBM Annual Meeting 2023 in Montréal, Canada. Due to the city's bilingual status, the event was held in both French and English. For this event, we collaborated with the journal Frontiers for Young Minds (FYM), whose target audience is kids and adolescents: Several young reviewers provided critical feedback for the presenters who submitted their manuscript for publication at this journal. We also interviewed Dr. Isotta Rigoni, who held two live events in schools in Italy, the organizer's homeland. Finally, Dr. Victor Hugo Souza organized a live event for more than 500 kids in Brazil, with multiple schools engaging remotely with the organizers, with a presentation about the brain and the movements followed by Q&A.

Figure 1. The OHBM Kids Live Review organizers interviewed: (left) Flavie Detcheverry, who presented at the in-person French/English session during the OHBM Annual Meeting 2023; (middle) Dr. Isotta Rigoni, co-organizer and co-presenter for the in-person Italian session; and (right) Dr. Victor Hugo Souza, one of the presenters/organizers for the remote Portuguese sessions.

Interviews with Successful BMT Event Organizers

Despite the hard work necessary to make each event happen, the importance of participating in science communication and sharing knowledge was the key motivator for Flavie, Isotta, and Victor. As pointed out by Victor:

"The kids raised fundamental questions that we usually take for granted in our routine work where we tend to focus too much on very specific topics, such as a particular neuron type or protein present in a single cellular mechanism. However, kids are surprisingly interested in discussing higher-level and even more difficult topics such as consciousness, death, memory, and learning. In the end, talking about the brain with the kids makes you look at science from a broader perspective".

And by Isotta:

"[…] to stimulate curiosity and to answer weird questions they might have about science. And then, of course, after having left Italy many years ago, it's really nice to do this with Italian students! After graduating from university, I have always worked abroad, and now, to have the opportunity to go back to my country (and even to villages nearby my hometown) and propose this program is finally the chance to “give something back” […]"

Practicing communication skills for an extraordinary audience was highlighted as one of the main gains of organizing a live event. As Isotta mentioned:

“Most of all, this experience gives you the opportunity to reflect on how to tailor your presentation for a specific audience. This is crucial for early career researchers because we don't always interact with the same people: sometimes we talk to research committees who don't know anything about our field, so we need to adjust to that. There are times we want to leave academia for industry where soft skills are highly valued, and then we need to tailor our presentation again. We're talking about completely different audiences, so preparing for the OHBM Kids Review definitely gives you the opportunity to think about how to present your topic from a different perspective […]”

Flavie also highlighted soft skills. In her own words:

"I think this experience helped me with writing for a general audience, as well as organization, and collaboration because we were like a whole team.

Step-by-Step Description of How to Organize a BMT Event

There are multiple ways to host a successful live Brain Mappers of Tomorrow event (see Table 1).The Organization often requires two or three months of preparation (e.g. creating a 2-3 minute trailer video, webpage, flyers, presentation materials, materials for additional activities, and a Frontiers for Young Minds manuscript if applicable), recruitment (e.g. contacting schools and teachers, advertising, determining date, time, and space of the live event) before the live event. The first step is to register on the OHBM-DIC website with at least one presenter, two moderators, and the proposed event topic. The registration is followed by producing materials to be included in the website disclosure and for audience outreach. Following this, the host has to decide when the event will occur: during the OHBM annual meeting or before the Annual Meeting. Finally, the organizers present the proposed topic on the event day and organize a Q&A session with the young audience. The OHBM DIC holds an orientation session for local organizers to help understand the process, provides various online and graphical resources which can be adapted and modified to meet unique needs from each team, and oversees and supports the preparation process throughout this period. In addition, the OHBM DIC uses a lot of online and social media resources to ensure that the efforts and contributions of local event organizers are appreciated and recognized by the general OHBM memberships.

Identifying and Overcoming Challenges with Organizing a BMT Event

Organizing a BMT event can be a time-demanding and effortful process, but it is all worth it in the end. Our previous organizers shared the main challenges they faced.

The OHBM-DIC will provide resources to help organizers with their presentation, outreach material, and any other challenges they may face during this process. As mentioned in the interviews, having an official website page within the OHBM-DIC website (https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/) was helpful for parents and teachers to verify that the event was official; it was shared with parents, teachers, and school managers and within the OHBM community. Building trust between all parties involved (organizers, schools, and parents) is usually the first challenge faced by an organizer. Each session had its own webpage with an abstract of the presentation, a description of the organization team, a short trailer video with subtitles, and the session details in both their native language and English. Moreover, OHBM-DIC also offers registration forms that organizers can use to organize and communicate with the attendees.

An important point to consider when organizing the event is to have the most effective way to contact schools, which varies depending on the context and environment. For example, Isotta reached out to people she knew, whereas Victor contacted the school's managers. They both worked actively to create and maintain an interest in the school to do this extracurricular activity. A piece of common advice was to let the school manager decide where, at what time, and which classes would participate, freeing the organizers from additional administrative challenges. Letting the school manage the event further helps to improve attendance and allows them to organize the activity so that it "synchroniz[es] with the school schedule and makes that as a part of school activities". Flavie’s session was during the OHBM Annual Meeting, so she needed to ensure kids would come to the venue with their caregivers. They achieved this by contacting schools in Montréal, parents in town they knew, and the parents at the OHBM Meeting.

Victor, whose event targeted larger groups of kids than Isotta’s faced a different challenge: how to optimize the time to ensure the kids could ask their questions. To manage the presentation time, Victor sent a Google Form to the school managers in advance, open for questions from the kids, so they could prepare and select the most common/interesting ones to include in the presentation material. We believe this approach strengthens the bond between the kids and the presenter, especially if the presenters are doing a remote session as Victor and his colleagues.

Value	French/English session	Portuguese session	Italian session II
Organizers	Presenter: Flavie Detcheverry Moderators: Sneha Senthil, Sridar Narayanan, AmanPreet Badhwar	Presenter: Victor Hugo Souza Moderators: Maíra Pinto, Renan Matsuda	Two members presented and moderated together: Isotta Rigoni and Irene Balboni
Date/time/location	In-person during the OHBM Annual Meeting (July 2023) in Montreál, Canada	Online (June 2023), each class in Brazil had its own access.	In-person (June 2023), Italy.
Participant	Most of the participants attended with their parents, who were OHBM participants.	More than 550 participants in approximately ten schools participated. The schools were distributed across many cities, mainly in Patrocinio, MG, and Uberlândia, SP (Brazil).	More than 80 kids from two grades, 8-9 years old and 9-10 years old, who were distributed across five classes from 2 schools (Edmondo de Amicis) in two cities in Italy.
Program organization	1-hour live event - Presentation (20 min) - Q & A (30 min) - Kids Reviewers decided on a “minor revision” for the FYM manuscript Brain Artcraft activity (10 min)	1.5-hour live event - Presentation (15 min) - Q & A (75 min)	2 hours live event - Presentation (60-90 min) - Outdoor activities: Q&A, reproducing: drawing from memory Rey–Osterrieth complex figure (ROCF), rewrite a piece of ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl, and others (40 min)
FYM Journal Submissio	Yes (see published article in https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2023.1257749)	No	No
Webpage	https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/french/french/	https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/portuguese_session/	https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/italian/italian_2/

Table 1. Summary description of the 2023 local events that these interviewees organized. Check our homepage https://ohbm-dic.github.io/ for details.

Next to the organization, Isotta and Victor faced another challenge: How to keep the event interesting and engaging enough, to keep their young audiences’ focus and attention? To overcome these difficulties, Isotta opted to include outdoor activities with games, and Victor included the anticipated questions from the students in the presentation.

Organizing a BMT event can be a time-demanding and effortful process, but it is all worth it in the end: The 2023 OHBM Kids Live Review was hugely successful based on the number of attendees around the world. And we hope to continue this for 2024 and beyond. Regardless of how you want to organize your event, either by innovating with an activity or by following the established protocol, you can count on the OHBM-DIC team to help you organize and prepare for this meaningful event.

Interview with Eduarda Gervini Zampieri Centeno, 2023 winner of the Brain Structure and Function Award

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:56:51 GMT

Author: Alexander Holmes
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth DuPre, Simon Steinkamp

Eduarda tells us about her work developing open-source Python pipelines.

Eduarda Gervini Zampieri Centeno is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the Bordeaux Neurocampus and a part-time Research Assistant at Amsterdam UMC (Vrije Universiteit Medisch Centrum; VUmc). Passionate about Open Science, her PhD thesis focuses on developing open-source Python pipelines for songbird research and understanding the brain correlates behind vocal learning. At the VUmc, Eduarda promotes and implements Open Science practices within her team and coordinates a working group for departmental transition toward this framework.

Before her PhD, Eduarda completed a 1-year Master's thesis project, applying Python-based topological data analysis to resting-state fMRI datasets from glioma patients. At the end of this intership, she compiled and published her experience as a practical tutorial freely available here. This work culminated in her paper titled “A hands-on tutorial on network and topological neuroscience” and for this work, Eduarda received the Brain Structure and Function award at the 2023

Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) annual meeting, held in Montreal (amongst other awards [1], [2]).
Eduarda also has experience hosting ReproducibiliTea journal clubs in Bordeaux and Amsterdam; she has organized the first Bordeaux Neurocampus Open Science Workshop, is a member of the Open Science Community Amsterdam board (OSCA), and recently became the Open Science Expert representing the Netherlands at Knowledge Exchange. Read on to hear more from Eduarda!

Q1: What are some advantages to using topological data analysis to standard graph theory methods?
Eduarda Gervini Zampieri Centeno (EGZC): Topological data analysis is a promising approach for studying complex systems and high-dimensional datasets. Compared to traditional methods, it is less susceptible to noise which allows for the computation of abstract data shapes, particularly in biological datasets. This framework enables researchers to explore intrinsic properties in data and go beyond the pairwise relationships traditionally used in graph-theoretical approaches. However, topological data analysis is not simply the opposite of graph theory; instead, it is a complementary approach. Combining these frameworks can yield exciting and relevant results, such as this article by our team. Given that the brain functions in a complex and non-linear way, tools (or combinations of tools!) that enable the investigation of higher order and complexity in data can greatly contribute to the accumulation of knowledge and progress in the field.

Q2: How do you think employing these methods will affect our understanding of human brain mapping?
EGZC: With the advent of new tools, we are constantly presented with new avenues for exploring the functioning and organization of the human brain. In particular, I believe that topological data analysis can better reconstruct and extract valuable information from brain data that has been inaccessible thus far. These new methods should bring us closer to a comprehensive understanding of one of the most complex biological systems.

Q3: What were the greatest challenges you faced when putting together the theoretical overview?
EGZC: Personally, the biggest challenge I faced was during the COVID-19 pandemic, working on this project while living abroad as a master's student. It was a difficult time for everyone, and, some days, it was hard to stay motivated working remotely. Fernando Antônio Nóbrega Santos one of my supervisors—and I had some in-person meetings to discuss this manuscript when possible, but the work was mostly done during lockdowns. However, this also allowed me to immerse myself in the work, put together something I'm very proud of, and learn to not take these opportunities to meet with my team in person for granted.

Professionally, the biggest challenge was understanding how to communicate the knowledge of mathematics and physics into a neuroscientific language. My background is in biology rather than natural sciences, which made communicating this information more difficult. However, this was also why the final material is accessible and comprehensive; as an interdisciplinary team, we understood the struggle and the need to communicate clearly across disciplines very well. I'm genuinely grateful to my supervisors and co-authors, who supported me in creating this material and shared my open science goals from the very beginning. This team experience was a great motivation booster to power through those days and deliver a project that now brings us so much joy.

Q4: How did you first become interested in this topic?
EGZC: This project was born from a mix of interests and interdisciplinary collaboration between Fernando Antônio Nóbrega Santos, Linda Douw, and myself. My primary motivation was to write my master's thesis in the style of a neuroscience Python tutorial that would align with open science and be helpful to others. Fernando, our maths and physics expert, was expanding his horizons toward neuroscience back then. In contrast, Linda, the team leader and clinical neuroimaging specialist, was taking a move toward projects beyond classical graph theoretical metrics and moving her lab to Python. They were excited and willing to teach me network neuroscience and algebraic topology, and in turn, I was eager to learn, code, and share our work with the world. I found our willingness to work together and exchange ideas very exciting. To summarise, the topic became of interest through my great experience working with my team and finding a great place to explore my passions while learning many new things.

Interview with Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo, 2023 OHBM Class of Fellows

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 14:17:26 GMT

Author: Yohan Yee
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth Dupre

A conversation with Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo, a 2023 OHBM Class Fellow, about his career trajectory.

Each year, OHBM honors eminent brain mappers with a Fellow of OHBM distinction. These individuals have “demonstrated academic and intellectual leadership in the disciplines represented by the Society over an extended period of time” and have the right to include FOHBM among their credentials. In 2023, three outstanding individuals were appointed as OHBM Fellows, including Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo.

(We have also interviewed the other 2023 Fellows of OHBM: Dr. Aina Puce and, previously, Dr. Karen Berman, along with other award winners as part of the 2023 Award Series).

Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo is a Professor at Beijing Normal University and Director of the Developmental Population Neuroscience Research Center, where he conducts population-level and lifespan neuroimaging research. He leads or contributes to several large-scale neuroscience efforts, including the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR), Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP), Brain Consortium for Reproducibility, Replicability and Reliability (3R-BRAIN), Chinese Imaging Genetics study (CHIMGEN), Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP), and Depression Imaging Research Consortium (DIRECT).

Dr. Zuo trained as an applied mathematician before jumping into the field of human brain mapping. Understanding the profound importance of quantifying reliability in measuring our brains’ function, his background provided a perfect basis to examine human spontaneous brain activity (SBA), a major topic of his research. His journey with OHBM started at the 14th Annual Meeting (Melbourne, 2008). At the time, he was just about to finish his first postdoctoral fellowship at Beijing Normal University and Chinese Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Professor Yu-Feng Zang and Professor Tianzi Jiang. He credits that meeting with providing an excellent platform for junior researchers to communicate their career development aspirations, and making possible his next postdoctoral position at New York University (NYU), where he trained in the field of pediatric neuroscience with Michael Milham and Francisco Xavier Castellanos.

In this interview, Dr. Zuo reflects on his career and OHBM, and provides a vision for the future.

Q1: What do you consider the highlight of your career so far?

Xi-Nian Zuo (XNZ): A career highlight would be establishing reliable measurements of individual differences in human spontaneous brain activity (SBA) over the past 15 years, through efforts such as evaluating test-retest reliability of most SBA metrics, initiating the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility, and theorizing psychometrical frameworks. A major scientific thread that connects these topics are a characterization of developmental trajectories of human brains across the lifespan, with a particular focus on the crucial period of childhood and adolescence. Specifically, my work has provided age-specific brain charting templates for both Chinese and US-born children, which have yielded novel insights such as the similarities and differences in large-scale cortical gradient topographies between children and young adults. These inclusive efforts have been anchored in international conferences on Human Brain Development, which I have founded and led, and have resulted in new stages of developmental cognitive neuroscience and developmental population neuroscience.

An overarching characteristic of these efforts are a dedication to open science principles; these motivate my involvement with large-scale projects including the 1000 Functional Connectome Project (FCP), the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP), the Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP), the Depression Imaging Research Consortium (DIRECT) and the Chinese Imaging Genetics study (CHIMGEN).

Q2: How have you been involved with the Organization and how has it changed over your tenure?

XNZ: I have been profoundly appreciative of OHBM for having shaped my career as an interdisciplinary researcher. My journey with OHBM began at the 14th Annual Meeting in 2008 (Melbourne, Australia). Over the past 15 years as a brain mapper, many of the aforementioned efforts have been facilitated by my personal experiences in OHBM. My first invited platform presentation, at the 2010 OHBM meeting, was ‘Googling the Brain’. Since then, focusing on reliability and reproducibility issues, I have been deeply involved in various OHBM events including Brainhack and education courses.

I have realized the importance of broadening participation in international brain mapping platforms. To further increase the inclusivity and diversity of the global brain mapping community, I launched an international meeting based in China, the International Conference on Human Brain Development (ICHBD), which has been held every two years for the past ten years. The ICHBD committee invited internationally distinguished scientists to attend the meetings, most scientists being active OHBM members. This has informed the broader OHBM community about the China neuroimaging community and its potential.

In 2018, I was elected to serve OHBM as a Council member and Program Chair. It has been my greatest pleasure to have had this opportunity to serve the OHBM community. During my time in office, although we faced multiple challenges due to the pandemic, OHBM has stayed strong and has been able to constantly provide an excellent platform and resources for global brain mappers to learn, exchange ideas, and develop. I am really honored to be named as a fellow of OHBM this year, which of course motivates me to continue such service. As above, OHBM has changed fast and transformed into a more influential stage for the community, and I will continue my responsibility of moving the field forward.

Q3: If you could start an entirely new research program right now, what would be the most exciting new direction for you to go in?

XNZ: I would combine mathematics, statistics, and neuroscience, applying these to brain experimental data with exceptional spatial or temporal sampling. One potential direction for me to consider is to recruit individuals from within the previous cohort I mentioned, the Chinese Color Nest Cohort, and collect additional data. This means that we now can track brain and mind changes of the hundreds of children and adolescents into their adulthood over a very long term (10 years), yielding a rich experimental resource for unlocking patterns of brain-mind development and their differential mechanisms under complex genetic-environment interactions. I name this entirely new stage CCNP program “Meet Our Kids Brain after A Decade”.

Interview with Dr. Aina Puce, 2023 OHBM Class of Fellows

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 21:18:55 GMT

Author: Naomi Gaggi
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth DuPre, Simon Steinkamp, Lavinia Uscatescu, Kevin Sitek

Dr. Puce shares her journey as part of the OHBM community, including her service as OHBM Chair from 2020-2022.

Dr. Aina Puce is an Eleanor Cox Riggs Professor of Psychological and Brain Science at Indiana University Bloomington. At the 2023 Annual Meeting, she was honored as a Fellow of OHBM for her contributions to the society and her outstanding academic and intellectual leadership. Her research career spans social neuroscience, multimodal neuroimaging (including electroencephalography [EEG] and magnetoencephalography [MEG]), and best practices in neuroimaging. Her book, MEG-EEG Primer—co-authored with Riitta Hari was just released in its second edition in 2023. Her current research focuses on the neural basis of social cognition and nonverbal communication.

Dr. Puce has been very involved in the OHBM organization, including chairing the society through the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she has been attending the annual meetings since 1995. In this interview, she talks about her history with OHBM and the positions she had, including her service as OHBM Chair from 2020-2022. She talks about how she navigated several obstacles and changes throughout this time. Dr. Puce lays out lessons learned throughout her career and during her time in the OHBM community—chiefly, that people matter. She highlights how working with her colleagues with whom she has cultivated mutual respect in both scientific and OHBM-related endeavors has been one of the highlights of her career and a major part of her OHBM tenure. She talks about her research and how she is developing a new direction for her work, including integrating her passion for art into science. We are grateful to Dr. Puce for her continued commitment to OHBM, and for taking the time to participate in this blog post. If you’re curious about how OHBM managed during the pandemic and the consequential major changes, her interview has the answers!

Q1: What do you consider the highlight of your career so far?

Aina Puce (AP): It is hard to pin down just one highlight, but I would probably have to say that writing the MEG-EEG Primer with Riitta Hari would be it. Together, we aimed to give the neuroimaging community a useful resource for learning about neurophysiology. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) are typically discussed separately, yet they are two sides of the same coin. This is something neither of us had been able to understand.

Neurophysiological methods are undergoing a resurgence, particularly with new technologies such as portable EEG and MEG performed with optically-pumped magnetometers. This calls for a new community of users who need to learn these methods. The EEG community has traditionally been quite insular and has remained apart from the rest of the neuroimaging community. Therefore, expertise in that area has not been disseminated as widely as it could have been. Unfortunately, this means that new users of the method have been ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and making errors that may have been made decades earlier. In writing the book, we tried to connect new users to instructive literature, both new and ‘ancient’, so that our discipline can continue to grow and progress with fewer hurdles.

Riitta Hari and I were friends before we started the project, and working on this project has really solidified our friendship – in some ways we have become like an old married couple. We never ever thought we would be writing a second edition, but it came out in August 2023! The takeaway from this experience is that the people you work with matter; you do the best work with colleagues with whom you have cultivated mutual respect and genuine affection.

Q2: How has the Organization changed over your tenure?

AP: So much has happened since 1995, and the first Human Brain Mapping meeting in Paris! I was a postdoctoral researcher then and presented our lab’s work on face perception at that historic meeting. That was before it was officially called Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) – that came a couple of years later with David Van Essen’s drafted by-laws providing the cornerstone for OHBM. OHBM to me has always been a family, a tribe, if you will… a tribe that pursues excellent neuroimaging science and methods. I keep going not just because of the science and methods, but because of the community.

I served OHBM in the Council Chair’s role from 2020-2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic. I rotated onto Council at the end of the OHBM meeting in Rome in 2019. What a change! From 4,000 people in the chaos of Rome in a summer heatwave, to a 2-year period of the chaos of lockdown and online isolation. We had to pivot rapidly in March 2020 from a fully in-person meeting to a fully online meeting in 3 months. Back then there was no real software for running online conferences and we had to cobble something together quickly. This created many practical problems, with changes being made even during the meeting itself. So much hard work from everyone on Council, Program Committee, Executive Committee, Open Science Special Interests Group (SIG), Student and Postdoc SIG, and BrainArt SIG. We learned what to do and importantly, what not to do.

Fast forward to planning the next OHBM – would this be online or in person? We formed a Technology Task Force, chaired by Alex Fornito in August 2020, to build a workable online platform for a virtual OHBM 2021. Things were moving along, and we were getting to where we wanted to be, working with a company called Sparkle [of Burning Man festival fame] – with Daniel Margulies as Program Chair heavily involved. We ran the online meeting and this showcased the strong points, as well as the weak links, of the online platform. We did better than the previous year, but again we could do better. This was also a wild and crazy ride for me, as OHBM Chair, it felt like we were isolated on Planet Brain and being bombarded by an asteroid field. I saw how hard people were working again on the Council, Program Committee, Executive Committee, Open Science SIG, Student and Postdoc SIG, and BrainArt SIG. The commitment to making a successful meeting was on everyone’s minds. I confess I was worried about the mental and physical health of a number of people at the time.

Fast forward to planning the 2022 Glasgow meeting: would it be in person, online or hybrid? We took a ‘go big or go home’ approach: we went hybrid. Again, March 2022 was the time that the big decision would be made: do we pull the plug on the in person meeting in Glasgow, or not? If not, what protocols do we need to adopt to try to keep OHBM-ers safe from COVID at the meeting?

Back to the hybrid question – the Planet Brain platform was being rejigged with OHBM-ers working together with Sparkle – some big things still needing to be done in March 2022. Things had suddenly gone quiet with Sparkle… Why? None of us knew that the software developers we were working with at Sparkle were in Ukraine. Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. No more needs to be said… Pivot yet again – a new online platform was needed, found & worked for us in the end. This time Randy Gollub was in the hot seat as Council Chair.

And of course, we all went to Glasgow, in the middle of a COVID surge there as it turned out – we did not know this at the time. The mood at the meeting was euphoric because people had not seen each other physically for years. Unfortunately, once the dust settled on the meeting, it was obvious that about 15% of attendees came down with COVID, despite the mask mandate during the meeting. Might things have been done differently? Sure. We can always say that after the fact.

So, how did we change over my tenure? We became super agile and learned to really rely on each other and work together, overcoming different philosophies in our approach to doing science. World geopolitics is going through a particularly turbulent period, so planning and running OHBM meetings has now become more challenging and potentially costly. Why were we able to do this so effectively despite the challenges of the pandemic? Because we are a dynamic and proactive community, one that makes diversity an important priority. Our society continues to grow – we have a number of wonderful SIGs that hold year-round activities. We have a number of specialist committees that tap into Council, and we are run by a truly excellent professional executive office. Despite the mayhem in the world during the last few years, I can say that I am glad to have served in the Council Chair’s role. It put me into close contact with so many wonderful people, who are truly the lifeblood of OHBM. Like I stated before, the people matter…

Q3: If you could start an entirely new research program right now, what would be the most exciting new direction for you to go in?

AP: That is exactly what I am in the process of doing right now! For a number of decades now I have studied the brain bases of non-verbal human interactions. I also became very involved in best practices and reproducibility/reliability in EEG and MEG, which I already mentioned earlier. But currently I have been switching directions completely, so that I can amalgamate my long-standing interests in art with my passion for science.
For 30 years or so, I have been a photographer who has also exhibited and sold her work. My current “thing” that I am experimenting with is cameraless photography. Over the years I have dabbled in ceramics, as well as painting in watercolor, and drawing in pencil and ink. I have always been interested in art and have spent a lot of time in art museums around the world. I am a docent in the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University (EMA), where I run tours for not only university classes, but for the general public as well. For the last couple of years I have taught a course for graduate and undergraduate students entitled “Art & the Brain”, which I teach at EMA. This greatly enriches the course, because we have direct access to the museum’s holdings and as well as curatorial and docent expertise.

To stay true to my neuroscientist roots, however, my lab is going portable: I will be moving my social neuroscience studies into the art museum! I have just acquired portable systems for collecting EEG/ExG and eye tracking data – these devices will allow our research subjects to undertake their art museum adventures untethered. We will look at relationships between effective art experiences and empathy, among other social neuroscience topics. Given the current ‘pandemic of inhumanity’ that we are experiencing in the world, I believe that this is an important topic to study. These are incredibly exciting times for me right now because I will finally be able to pursue my interests in art and science at the same time!

Interview with the SPM Team, winner of the Open Science Award 2023

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:55:14 GMT

Author: Elisa Guma
Editors: simon steinkamp, Elizabeth dupre

Learn more from the SPM team about open science.

Queen Square, home of the FIL and other neuroscience / neurology departments, in the winter snow from a previous year (courtesy of Peter Zeidman)

Next in our award winner interview series, we had the chance to hear from this year’s Open Science Award winner, the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) Team based out of the Functional Imaging Laboratory (FIL) at University College London. SPM is a free, open source, and widely used software suite designed for the analysis of brain imaging data across various modalities including PET, fMRI, EEG, MEG, and SPECT. Additionally, SPM provides different analysis approaches for neuroimaging data that go beyond the classic General Linear Model (GLM), such as Dynamic Causal Modelling (DCM) and Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM). SPM was first developed by Karl Friston (see an interview with him from 2017 on this blog) for the statistical analysis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. Since then, it has gone through several technical improvements to reflect theoretical advances in the field (here is a history on their website and a retrospective piece about the software by Dr. John Ashburner). The current software version can be found here. In addition to maintaining and improving the software, the SPM team also offers in-person courses to help neuroimagers learn how to use their tools.

Since the early 1990s, SPM has been at the forefront of open science—even before the notion of open science was widespread in the neuroimaging community. Indeed, Dr. Karl Friston used to give away the software on floppy disks to those who asked; now it is freely available for download. Additionally, the SPM team has been leading substantial efforts to teach SPM and its methods by providing courses or publishing tutorials.

We are grateful to Peter Zeidman, Olivia Kowalczyk and the SPM team for being willing to answer a few questions about their work. Read on to learn more about the SPM team and their thoughts on open science!

Q1: How would you characterize the state of open science today, and what aspects do we still need to improve on?

SPM Team: First, thank you again to OHBM for our 2023 Open Science Award! It recognises the hard work of generations of researchers who have developed new analysis methods in the SPM software package and made them freely available to the community. A lot has changed since Karl Friston travelled the world in the 1990s, giving away SPM on floppy disks. But the culture of making analysis methods openly available—and dedicating time every week to supporting users with their analyses—has remained constant through SPM’s 30-year history.

Open research has brought enormous benefits to the neuroimaging community. It is now entirely unremarkable to obtain a dataset using OpenNeuro, in standard machine-readable BIDS format, then apply an open-source analysis package like SPM or FSL to test hypotheses, and use a meta-analysis tool like Neurosynth to help contextualise results against the literature. These brilliant advances have come through the hard work of dedicated researchers, who care deeply about the research we conduct as a community.

To keep up this pace of change, we need to provide researchers with incentives for open research beyond “knowing it’s the right thing to do.” Grassroots initiatives have been essential in promoting open research, but these are often driven by early career researchers, who may not have the decision-making power, budget or duration of employment to deliver the projects they envisage. Now, the key drive needs to come from the top. Institutions, journals and in particular, funders, need to get involved to incentivise the practices that we all know are best for research.

Q2: Even though we know it’s best practice, what are some challenges that make open science harder for researchers to achieve?

SPM Team: There are many remaining challenges for open research we could talk about—lack of awareness of good practice, lack of time, lack of know-how, the need for support from line managers and need for greater diversity. But we’ll highlight one pressing issue that we have been thinking a lot about recently: how to ensure that people understand the theory and assumptions that underlie their analyses.

It is now easier than ever to perform neuroimaging analyses using open-source software. However, if these tools are used as “black boxes” without understanding what’s going on under the hood, then there is a real danger of generating meaningless results. For analysis software to be truly “open source”, it means more than simply making the code freely available; we need to provide training and meaningful documentation on the methods and algorithms that are written into analysis software.

This issue is particularly acute where pipelines are used, which are wrappers that enable multiple analysis packages to be flexibly chained together. Pipelines have become increasingly popular and have delivered clear benefits—such as making analyses reproducible at the click of a button, and for baking-in quality control procedures. However, with software packages like SPM, FSL and AFNI being combined in ways that the developers hadn’t envisaged, there can be unintended consequences that may not be obvious such as changing the statistical properties of data that violate the assumptions of subsequent tests. To avoid these problems, it’s vital that pipelines are carefully considered from a theoretically-principled perspective, and that researchers have some understanding of the theory when applying neuroimaging analysis software.

We are hard at work in the SPM Dev Team to provide better training on the methods that underlie neuroimaging analyses. We have just released the first stage of a new documentation website at (https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/docs/). The development of this website was led by Dr Olivia Kowalczyk, and it includes click-by-click tutorials on how to use SPM, together with all new video lectures on the relevant theory, delivered by our international faculty. We have also revamped our bi-annual SPM courses, which take place in London and online, to better balance the delivery of theory and interactive workshops. We’ve made videos of all the lectures freely available at https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/course/

Q3: Focusing on SPM, what are some challenges in maintaining such a large but essential toolbox for the neuroimaging community?

SPM Team: An academic saying that they need more funding is about as surprising as a child saying they need more candy. That said… we need more funding. Specifically, we need funding opportunities for developing and maintaining research software. The teams who develop neuroimaging packages like SPM tend to be far smaller than their commercial counterparts, and they typically have many academic commitments beyond writing software. There are projects that we’d love to conduct, such as refactoring particular sections of the code, if only we had the time and resources. This work may not be as seductive as discovery science, but it is vital for enabling future discoveries—so we need this funding gap to be addressed.

Other key challenges in the SPM Dev Team relate to managing a large codebase in a changing software landscape. SPM is open-source, written 90% in MATLAB and 10% in C++. We also provide Standalone SPM as a compiled version that people can use without a MATLAB license. Our code is highly optimized, having been continuously developed and refined for over 30 years. This makes SPM very stable and bug reports rare. By writing our code primarily in MATLAB, we create analysis tools that work on any platform with good performance. This gives us more time to focus on methods development.

Nevertheless, people are increasingly preferring programming languages that are fully open source— Python in particular. In the SPM Dev Team, we get it, and a priority for us is making SPM accessible to everyone. There are excellent projects like Nipype, which already enable Python users to integrate SPM into their analysis pipelines. But our long-term plan is to go further, enabling people to have the same quality of experience using SPM, regardless of whether they are in a Python or MATLAB environment. Of course, developing this kind of deep integration with Python will require funding – so watch this space!

Finally, I will mention that we are changing how we do software development, aimed at greatly improving transparency. Thanks to the hard work of Dr Guillaume Flandin, we have recently moved from a private subversion repository to a public Github account (https://github.com/spm/), which means that all of our development work is now public facing. We are expanding the team who actively contribute to SPM, refreshing our course content and writing new training materials. In terms of features, I can highlight new tools in SPM for OP-MEG analysis (led by Dr Tim Tierney), https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/docs/tutorials/opm/. We will also be implementing novel methods for analysing naturalistic neuroscience experiments which tend to involve free movement and long recordings. This work will be funded by a Wellcome Discovery Research Platform grant (https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/news-item/department-of-imaging-neuroscience-awarded-funding-to-discover-how-the-brain-allows-us-to-live-our-lives/). We are looking forward to a very exciting few years ahead for SPM—and for open research in neuroimaging!

What language does your dog speak? How dog brains process language

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 20:30:26 GMT

Author: Alex Albury
Edited by: Elisa guma, kevin sitek

Lay summary of article by Cuaya et al. about language representation in the dog brain.

If you have a pet, chances are you talk to them, though you may not expect them to actually understand you. But have you ever stopped to think about just how much your furry friends might be listening? Researchers in the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary set out to find out just how much dogs understand from human language. To do this, they conducted a study examining what happens in a dog’s brain when they hear different languages.

Although language acquisition has been extensively studied for decades, we are still far from understanding how language learning happens in the brain. Some researchers have taken more of a comparative approach to this question by investigating language cognition in species other than humans, including macaques, parrots, and man’s best friend, dogs.

Language learning is believed to rely heavily on exposure; that is, we learn by hearing. A popular theory of language acquisition is statistical learning. Under this theory, the brain is viewed as a pattern detection machine that is constantly learning the regularities of the world around us. In language, these regularities include aspects of speech such as tone, rhythm, and word boundaries.

Like humans, many dogs are exposed to language in their everyday environments. And just like we learn language by hearing it, dogs also gain something from this constant language exposure. Research has shown that dogs can identify speaker identity, emotional cues, and recognize specific words. And although dogs show a preference for the language they hear most, there’s a big difference between recognizing sounds, and actually understanding language.

Laura Cuaya and colleagues set out to better understand how our dogs’ brains process language and whether dogs are tuned-in to their own “native” language – the language they’ve been exposed to the most.
The researchers trained dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner and recorded their brain activity while they listened to audio clips in a familiar or unfamiliar language. As a control, they also played the dogs scrambled versions of both languages, so they could test whether the dogs only respond to speech-like sounds or to actual language.
They found different patterns of brain activity for scrambled and unscrambled speech in parts of the primary auditory cortex, an area of the brain important for processing speech sounds like tempo and pitch. This finding suggests that dog brains are attuned to language.

The authors are careful to point out that this finding could have multiple causes. Along with the scans of brain activity, they also had human raters listen to the audio recordings and rate how natural they sounded. The activity in the brain areas responsible for distinguishing between scrambled and unscrambled speech correlated strongly with these ratings of naturalness. This means that while the results could indicate that parts of the primary auditory cortex are responding to speech sounds specifically, it could also be the case that they are just sensitive to the naturalness of the sounds.

Next, the researchers compared brain activity between the audio clips in dogs’ familiar language and an unfamiliar language. There were unique patterns of activity for the familiar versus unfamiliar language in parts of the secondary auditory cortex, and temporal cortex – areas of the brain responsible for identifying emotion, semantic meaning, and speaker identity. Even more surprising was that this difference in activity was greater in older dogs, suggesting that the amount of exposure a dog has with a language changes how they respond to it. This lines up well with statistical learning theories of how humans learn language.

Although fMRI results can’t really tell us what dogs are thinking, these findings hint at the possibility that not only can dogs differentiate between low-level acoustic features like tone and emotional valence, but they may also be able to recognize distinct languages.

These findings may seem intuitive at first; after all, dogs have a long evolutionary history of close contact with humans, and so it’s no surprise that they might be sensitive to language. But these results provide some of the first evidence of distinct brain activity patterns for two languages in a non-human species. And maybe they’ll make you second-guess what you say when you think no one’s listening.

Check out our interview with the first author, Dr. Laura V. Cuaya here!

Original article: Cuaya LV, Hernandez-Perez R, Boros B, Deme A, Andics A (2022). Speech naturalness and language representation in the dog brain. Neuroimage, 248: 118811.

Interview with Dr. Laura V. Cuaya, winner of the NeuroImage Editor’s Choice Award 2023

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 20:18:50 GMT

Author: Kevin Sitek
Editors: Elizabeth Dupre, Alex Albury, elisa guma

Interview with Dr. Cuaya, winner of the Neuroimage Editor's Choice award.

If you have pet dogs, you surely know how familiar they become with the sound of your voice. But can dogs actually tell the difference between the language you speak with them and other languages they’ve never heard before? Dr. Laura V. Cuaya set out to find out, and her findings in her paper “Speech naturalness detection and language representation in the dog brain” won her the Editor’s Choice Award from NeuroImage at the 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting.

In her paper, Dr. Cuaya found unique patterns of brain activity in dogs when they were hearing voices in a familiar vs. unfamiliar language. The differences were stronger in older dogs, suggesting that more exposure to a particular language drives stronger representation of voices in that language in dogs. You can read a more in-depth summary of her paper here.

Dr. Cuaya is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria. Much of her work uses functional MRI to investigate how sensory stimulation—looking at faces, hearing voices, and touching objects—is represented in the brains of both humans and dogs. Before moving to Austria, Dr. Cuaya conducted research at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary and at the Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Querétaro, México.

Read on to learn about Dr. Cuaya’s experience working with canine participants in neuroimaging and what we should take away from her research!

Q1: What are the main challenges of conducting MRI studies using dogs, and how have you overcome them?
Laura V Cuaya (LVC): Surprisingly, MRI studies with dogs share some challenges with MRI studies involving human infants. For instance, experimental sessions must be brief; in our experiments, each run lasts a maximum of 6 minutes, followed by a break outside the scanner. Despite dogs' excellent social skills, there are limitations in using speech stimuli in studies with dogs compared to what we would use with adult human participants. We also pay special attention to the design of our experiments: we aim to present stimuli that are as engaging as possible (while avoiding excessive excitement that may lead to significant movements) to maintain the dogs' attention.
Despite these challenges, it is remarkable how cooperative dogs can be as participants. In fact, dogs often show more enthusiasm for participating in my experiments than many of my human friends.

Q2: What are the main take-aways of this work?
LVC: Dogs are constantly learning about their social world, including how the human language that surrounds them sounds. Our results showed that, regardless of the language dogs heard, the activity patterns in their primary auditory cortex distinguished speech from non-speech. Meanwhile, their secondary auditory cortex differentiated between Spanish and Hungarian. Interestingly, the older the dog, the better their brain distinguished between languages.
This study gave the first evidence that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages, suggesting that the ability to learn the sound regularities of a language is not uniquely human. Despite dogs never being explicitly taught the sounds of their familiar language, their brains differentiated a familiar language from an unfamiliar language. As someone with dogs in my family, it's fascinating to know that dogs continuously pick up on subtle cues from their social (and auditory) environment. I would encourage people to provide their dogs with opportunities to keep learning by giving them rich social environments.

Q3: Was there a finding that most surprised you?
LVC: The positive correlation between the age of the dog and their brain's ability to distinguish between the two languages. It seems that the longer a dog lives with its humans, the better they learn how their language sounds. Although we suspected that language discrimination was influenced by exposure and learning, we couldn’t control the amount of exposure to a language among our participants, as each family had a unique linguistic environment. We only found this result because one of the reviewers asked us about the effect of exposure on language discrimination. So, we used age as an indirect measurement of exposure to a language. We were happily surprised about this finding.

Q4: What can dogs teach us about neuroscience that other animal models cannot (ex: mice, rats, non-human primates, zebrafish, etc.)?
LVC: The family dog is a promising animal model in neuroscience for multiple reasons. Thinking from an evolutionary perspective, humans and dogs shared their last common ancestor more than 10 million years ago. Then, just some thousand years ago, dogs emerged from the wolf population—a highly social animal—as a new species through domestication. For dogs, interpreting and cooperating with people had adaptative value in their anthropogenic environment. This evolutionary perspective gives a beautiful comparative framework to the field of neuroscience, where we can compare the brain responses of two species with different evolutionary histories as they process human social information under the same experimental setting.

And here is another reason to choose family dogs as an animal model: for dogs, the human information is meaningful! During their lives they have been exposed to and interacted with humans, and—due to their domestication—dogs are born with a predisposition to understand human communicative cues. This cross-species communication is a special attribute, even compared to other domesticated species.

From a practical and ethical perspective, thanks to the trainability of dogs, we can recruit family dogs that can be trained to remain still inside an fMRI scanner. During our tests, dogs are awake and without any physical restriction, and they can leave the session at any point. We are always grateful for our participants and their families for their time and endless help in our research.

Finally, personally, I hope that by sharing insights into the social and cognitive abilities of dogs, we can contribute to fostering broader societal recognition of them as social beings and enhance their welfare.

What can 12 minutes of fMRI tell you about your fetus’s brain?

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 20:19:33 GMT

Author: Lavinia Carmen Uscătescu
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth Dupre, Kevin sitek

Lay summary of publication by Ji et al (2022): “Fetal behavior during MRI changes with age and relates to network dynamics”

That fetuses move inside the womb is nothing new, but how these early movement patterns could predict neonatal health is only beginning to be understood. So far, generally reduced intra-uterine movement has been associated with preterm birth and mild language delay, while more active fetuses have shown enhanced neonatal brain development. It could therefore prove useful to learn whether specific fetal movement patterns could be used as early indicators of potential developmental delays.

Researchers at the New York University School of Medicine have set out to decode the hidden information in fetal movement patterns. Their paper, led by Dr. Lanxin Ji, “Fetal behavior during MRI changes with age and relates to network dynamics”, was awarded the Human Brain Mapping Editor's Choice Award at the 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting. Check out our interview with Dr. Ji here!

For this study, the researchers recruited healthy individuals that were six months pregnant and obtained functional MRI scans of their fetuses. This 6 month time point was chosen because there is evidence to suggest that a fetus’s brain begins to show signs of intrinsic connectivity (i.e., when brain areas spontaneously communicate to each other) at this stage in development. The researchers were especially interested in the dynamic fluctuations of co-activation patterns in a brain region called the supplementary motor area, thus aiming to isolate brain networks that support motor behavior of fetuses. This area is part of the frontal cortex and is functionally involved in the motor control network, mainly in motor planning and learning. To quantify fetal motion, the researchers employed a deep learning-based automated tool to extract fetal brain from maternal tissues and used a measure called framewise displacement—a motion parameter which is quantified at each time point throughout the fMRI scan.

After birth, the researchers assessed the motor development of the infants at 7 months and then at 36 months of age. They showed that persistence of a specific co-activation pattern of these motor networks in the 6 month fetus correlated with newborn motor development at 7 months of age.

The relevance of these findings is twofold. First, motion during fMRI scanning is usually discarded as a mere artefact that just adds noise to the signal, so finding that it may in fact carry useful information is remarkable. Second, it is noteworthy that early fetal behavior and brain activity can in fact anticipate later developmental milestones. This raises hope that perhaps, with enough refinement and standardization of this approach, we may not be far from identifying very early signs of delayed development and therefore prompt timely intervention.

Original Research: Ji, L., Majbri, A., Hendrix, C.L., Thomason, M.E., (2023). Fetal behavior during MRI changes with age and relates to network dynamics. Human Brain Mapping, 44(4): 1683-1694. doi: 10.1002/hbm.26167

Interview with Dr. Lanxin Ji, winner of the Human Brain Mapping Editor’s Choice Award 2023

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:35:28 GMT

Author: Elisa Guma
Editors: Elizabeth dupre, kevin sitek

Interview with Dr. Lanxin Ji

Next in our award winner interview series is Lanxin Ji, who received the Human Brain Mapping Editor’s Choice Award for her paper titled “Fetal behavior during MRI changes with age and relates to network dynamics”. Dr. Ji is currently a postdoctoral fellow at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine in the department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry where she leverages fetal and infant brain imaging data to better understand brain development in the earliest phases of life.

Prior to her work at NYU, she earned her PhD degree in Biomedical Imaging from Tsinghua University, which included a one year fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. During this time, she developed data-driven methods to measure neural compensation (i.e., the way in which the brain reorganizes itself in older adults to compensate for neural deterioration), and she studied the effects of exercise and cognitive training on brain plasticity over time in older adults.

We are grateful that Dr. Ji was willing to answer a few questions about her work. To read a lay summary of the research paper for which she won this award, please click here. Read on to learn more about Dr. Ji’s research!

Q1: What are the main challenges of conducting fetal MRI studies, and how have you overcome them?
Lanxin Ji (LJ): Conducting fetal fMRI research comes with its unique set of challenges that distinguish it from adult imaging. In a typical fMRI scan, subjects need to remain still for a long period (typically over 10 minutes) to obtain high-quality data. However, this isn't possible when working with fetuses. Fetal movements, both unpredictable and unavoidable, can disrupt the fetal MRI data. So, managing this motion is a significant challenge. In addition, the data collection method also differs for fetal MRI. While adult MRI scans usually employ head coils to gather data directly from the brain, with fetuses, we use abdominal coils placed on the mother's belly. Fetal brains are surrounded by maternal tissues, creating a more complex background compared to the relatively clean background in adult MRI. These distinctions result that established data processing pipelines designed for adults may not be readily applicable to fetal fMRI.

While these challenges are significant, our lab—led by Dr. Moriah Thomason, a pioneer in fetal brain imaging—has been at the forefront of overcoming them by developing methodologies for optimally acquiring and processing fetal fMRI. In this work on “Fetal behavior during MRI changes with age and relates to network dynamics”, we manually selected data segments with minimal motion to estimate neural signals and applied individual-level ICA denoising to mitigate motion-related artifacts. Additionally, we employed deep learning techniques to separate fetal brains from maternal tissues. We also used optimal strategies for various preprocessing steps, including normalization, masking, denoising, and smoothing, using our previous evaluation of their relative impacts to make informed decisions in our data processing workflow.

Q2: What are the main take-aways of this work?
LJ: At a high-level, our study demonstrates the groundbreaking capability to simultaneously capture fetal behavior and neural activity through fetal fMRI. We discovered that natural movements of fetuses during fMRI scans, which have long been considered barriers to effective imaging, can be quantified as meaningful indicators of fetal behavior. Our findings provide the initial evidence of neural activity patterns being linked to both fetal motion at the time of measurement as well as future infant motor behavior. Specifically, for more mature fetuses or those displaying more movements, their motor cortex tends to exhibit lower connectivity to brain regions within its community, possibly reflecting a maturation process in which the motor network extends its connections to other large-scale networks.

Q3: What is required to bring fetal neuroimaging to the next level?
LJ: Advanced data analysis methods are needed to extract meaningful information from fetal neuroimaging data. We know many research groups, including us, are working to establish best practices for collecting and processing fetal neuroimaging data from various angles. This involves refining motion correction algorithms, addressing magnetic field inhomogeneities, reconstructing data disrupted by motion, creating normalization algorithms tailored to the contrast of fetal images, and designing denoising strategies specifically for fetal data. As these efforts continue to advance, they hold the potential of establishing a consensus in the field of fetal neuroimaging, which will greatly enhance the reproducibility of findings and promote comparability across studies. Further, the integration of data from multiple imaging modalities, such as fMRI, DTI, and structural MRI, will provide a more comprehensive view of fetal brain development. In addition, larger and diverse open datasets are also crucial in drawing reliable conclusions and furthering clinical applications.

Making Connections: Molecular and connectomic contributions to disease and disorder in the human brain

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 19:07:22 GMT

Author: Alexander Albury

Lay summary of article by Hansen JY et al. 2022 examining relationship between multimodally infomred brain connectivity across disorders

It's easy to picture the brain as a tangle of wires, criss-crossing and carrying information in all directions. But there's order in the chaos of our brains, with each of these connections serving a purpose by facilitating communication between the many cooperating brain areas necessary for complex behaviors. And in such a densely connected network, few things happen in isolation. Just as this broad connectivity serves to support the transportation of resources and information through the network, it also makes the brain more susceptible to disorders that can disrupt this delicate system.

A multidisciplinary group of researchers set out to investigate how much neurological disorders are caused by factors limited to a specific brain region, versus how much they depend on variability and abnormalities in larger brain networks.

In a paper published in Nature in 2022, Justine Y. Hansen and colleagues examined the relationship between connectivity—how parts of the brain connect to each other—and molecular vulnerability—the characteristics of individual cells in specific brain regions, in the presentation and progression of 13 common diseases and disorders, including ADHD, schizophrenia, depression, and epilepsy.

Using a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and positron emission tomography (PET) scans as well as gene expression data from close to 50,000 participants, the authors found that local, molecular features such as synapse density and neuron myelination, are more related to disorders and disease than connectivity across larger brain areas. However, the contributions of molecular attributes and connectivity vary across diseases. For example, epilepsy and schizophrenia are more heavily influenced by connectivity across brain regions, while ADHD and depression are more influenced by molecular characteristics within brain regions.

And although they found that many disorders are largely driven by molecular features, these features also interact with structural networks to shape how brain abnormalities progress. Local abnormalities in densely connected hub regions, or “epicenters”, such as the sensorimotor cortex, are implicated in multiple neurological diseases. If a part of the brain is important for many neurological functions, disruptions in that part are likely to affect other parts of the brain.

Their results also revealed the similarities in brain characteristics between the 13 disorders studied. In line with their findings on the role of molecular vulnerability, disorder similarity was specifically driven by similarity in molecular features rather than connectivity.
Altogether, the results provide a clearer picture of the progression of the 13 disorders studied, as well as broaden our understanding of the complex interactions across brain regions in neurological disease. These kinds of large-scale studies go a long way in helping us understand the mess of wires we carry around in our heads.

Original Research: Hansen, J. Y., Shafiei, G., Vogel, J. W., Smart, K., Bearden, C. E., Hoogman, M., Franke, B., van Rooij, D., Buitelaar, J., McDonald, C. R., Sisodiya, S. M., Schmaal, L., Veltman, D. J., van den Heuvel, O. A., Stein, D. J., van Erp, T. G. M., Ching, C. R. K., Andreassen, O. A., Hajek, T., … Misic, B. (2022). Local molecular and global connectomic contributions to cross-disorder cortical abnormalities. Nature Communications, 13(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32420-y

Justine Y. Hansen is the recipient of the 2023 Karl Zilles Award in Integrative Neuroscience. Read our interview with Justine here!

Interview with Justine Y Hansen, winner of the Karl-Zilles Award in 2023

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 16:59:38 GMT

Author: Simon Steinkamp
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth Dupre, & kevin sitek

Interview with Justine Y Hansen, winner of the 2023 Karl-Zilles Award

Next up in our award-winner interview series is Justine Y. Hansen, who received the 2023
Karl Zilles Award in Integrative Neuroscience in 2023. This award was introduced at the OHBM 2022 annual meeting in Glasgow in memory of Karl Zilles, to honor his pioneering work integrating modern neuroanatomical approaches with multi-modal in-vivo neuroimaging. The award series recognizes PhD students and postdoctoral fellows who are continuing in this tradition, developing new and innovative approaches for examining neuroanatomy

Justine Y. Hansen does just that. In her impressive work, she thoroughly investigates how neurotransmitter distributions shape cortical architecture across many modalities and spatial scales. She led a huge collaborative open science effort to collate positron emission tomography (PET) data across research groups, resulting in data from more than 1200 healthy individuals, mapping 19 different receptors and transporters across 9 neurotransmitter systems. Using multiple imaging modalities, such as functional and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, dMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), she shows that the neurotransmitter receptor density maps follow known structural and functional organizational principles. Further, she shows that the receptor density maps are associated with patterns of cortical atrophy across 12 different psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.

This study, published in Nature Neuroscience, has been widely recognized and was awarded a Brain Star award by the Canadian Association for Neuroscience in 2022. Justine extended this work to examine how cortical maps of gene expressions, neurotransmitter identity, metabolism, and myelination relate to cortical abnormalities in 13 neurodevelopmental, neurological, or psychiatric conditions (published here; check out the lay summary of this article on our blog!). She further leveraged gene expression and receptor density mapping (using PET or autoradiography) to assess whether gene expression measures can be used to estimate neurotransmitter receptor/transporter densities in the cortex (in this publication). Finally, in her newest work, she investigated how the brainstem, an often overlooked part of the brain, integrates into the larger cortical architecture.

Justine completed her bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience in 2020 at McGill University and is currently a PhD student in the Network Neuroscience Lab led by Bratislav Misic at the Montreal Neurological Institute. We are grateful that Justine was willing to answer a few questions about her work and research trajectory. Read on to learn more!

1. How did your passion for neuroscience start?
Justine Y Hansen (JYH): Doesn't everyone think the brain is cool?

2. What have been the most important factors that shaped your scientific trajectory up to this point?
JYH: I am hugely grateful for and indebted to amazing scientists and mentors along the way who have served as role models and helped (and currently help) me shape what type of scientist I want to be. That's a bit vague, but honestly my scientific trajectory is still in its infancy so we'll see what happens in the future… .

3. How can researchers and clinicians make use of the impressive contributions you have made to the field of brain mapping?
JYH: One main theme in my work is that combining brain phenotypes across different spatial scales (and therefore different datasets, data modalities, and people) can help us understand how the brain is integrating all these layers of information. Both the brain maps as well as the methods that I use and help share will hopefully facilitate future multimodal, multiscale analyses of the human brain. I think the PET receptor images in particular will be useful to clinicians and researchers alike because these neurotransmitter receptor systems are fundamental to both the link between structure and function, as well as many diseases and disorders.

4. What were the biggest challenges you faced in integrating modalities across space and scale (i.e., neuroimaging, PET, gene expression, etc.)?
JYH: One big challenge is that it's impossible for me to be an expert on every data modality, so there is always plenty I don't know about the data I'm working with. Although this can feel overwhelming at times, it's also a great opportunity to collaborate with the experts. I feel extremely grateful and lucky to have learned so much from individuals who are truly experts in their field (whether that be image preprocessing, or biological mechanisms of neurotransmitters and receptors, or open science practices, etc).

Another challenge comes down to the methodology. How do we compare measurements that are capturing processes on completely different spatial and temporal scales, and from different people? Another consideration is that they are all group-averages, so they may not even be a good representation of the underlying biological mechanism (?!). I try to conduct extensive sensitivity and robustness analyses but this is an ongoing challenge and a big direction for future work; that is, better methods and data for integrative analyses across data modalities and scales.

5. What is the next big innovation we need in the field of multi-modal in-vivo imaging for the study of neuroanatomy and brain function?
JYH: As much as I am a big fan of big data, I think the next big thing is going to be densely sampled individuals. How do all these markers—anatomy, structure, function, molecular profiles, gene expression, metabolism, you name it—relate to one another in a single individual? I would love to know :)

Education in Neuroimaging Award - Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 21:43:44 GMT

Elisa Guma & The Communications Committee

Interview with Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda, winner of the 2023 Education in Neuroimaging Award

At the 2023 annual OHBM meeting, Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda received the Education in Neuroimaging Award for her significant contribution to education and training in the field of neuroimaging. Prof. Mourao-Miranda leads the Machine Learning Neuroimaging Lab at the Centre for Medical Imaging Computing (CMIC) in the Computer Science Department at the University College London (UCL). Prof. Mourao-Miranda received her bachelor’s in Electronic Engineering at Federal university of Para (Brazil). She then pursued a MSc in Computer Science and a Ph.D in Neuroscience at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Next, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Neural Computation at Siemens, Munich, Germany followed by one at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London. After her second postdoctoral experience she was awarded two prestigious Wellcome Trust fellowships (Research Career Development and Senior Research) which enabled her to establish a research group at UCL.

Her group applies pattern recognition and machine learning to neuroimaging data with the goal of uncovering the relationship between brain and behaviour. One of the goals of her research program is to develop novel machine learning models to investigate the complex relationships between neuroimaging data and multidimensional descriptions of mental health disorder in hopes of improving understanding, diagnosis, and prognosis for these conditions.
We had the pleasure of asking Prof. Mourao-Miranda a few questions about her work, research trajectory, and any advice she has for junior trainees. Read on to learn more! You can also check out our previous interview with Prof. Mourao-Miranda showcasing her OHBM 2022 Keynote lecture here.

Q1. Which elements in your career do you think contributed most to you receiving this award?
Janaina Mourao-Miranda (JMM):I believe pioneering the application of machine learning to neuroimaging analyses, leading the development of the open-source software Pattern Recognition for Neuroimaging Toolbox and a long track record of organizing courses and workshops to train students and researchers on applying machine learning to neuroimaging data were the key elements that contributed to receiving the award. Also coming from Brazil where access to education in neuroimaging is limited made me understand the need for and importance of developing accessible tools and materials for training multidisciplinary researchers across the world.

Q2. In your experience, have economic barriers become easier to overcome in order to ensure greater access to neuroimaging education and training? What can we, as a community, do to ensure even better access to resources in the future?
JMM: Despite initiatives such as reduced registration costs for members from lower-income countries to attend the OHBM meeting, Merit Abstract Award and Merit Travel Stipend, I think economic barriers are still very difficult to overcome to access neuroimaging education and training in lower income countries. For example, academics from these countries still struggle to pay the OHBM membership and students have limited access to travel funds. This can be clearly seen by the distribution of attendees by country attending OHBM every year. Furthermore, the educational materials on the OnDemand platform are only accessible to OHBM members. Having hybrid OHBM annual meetings with cheaper online registration (for lower income countries) would enable researchers that cannot afford traveling to the conference to access its contents. Furthermore, creating cheaper membership for academics and students from those countries would enable more access to the educational materials on the OnDemand platform.

Q3. Do you believe that neuroscience education could be incorporated at earlier levels (i.e., high school and earlier)? If so, how?
JMM: Yes. I think neuroscience education should be incorporated from elementary school in an age appropriated manner. For example, it would be very helpful for kids to learn about the effects of screen time and video games on their brains. This would likely lead to positive changes on behaviour and mental health outcomes.

Q4. What are some elements that contribute to a well rounded neuroscience education? Are there some topics that should be emphasized (ex: statistics, ethics, etc.)?
JMM: Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary field and as such requires a multidisciplinary education, covering neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, psychology, modelling (physics, statistics, machine learning), ethics, etc. That said, no one can know everything so working on a multidisciplinary and supportive team significantly contributes to getting a well-rounded education in neuroscience. There is not a single pathway to becoming a neuroscientist, many trajectories can lead to it.

Early Career Investigator Award: Dr. Catie Chang

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 20:27:13 GMT

Elisa Guma & the communications committee

Interview with Dr. Catie Chang, 2023 Early Career Investigator Awardee

At the 2023 Organization for Human Brain Mapping annual meeting, held in Montreal, several outstanding scientists were recognized for their contributions to the field. Dr. Catie Chang was awarded the Early Career Investigator Award for her significant contributions to the field of human brain mapping. Dr. Chang is a Sally and Dave Hopkins Faculty Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. She received her BSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, after which she pursued an MSc and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in the Radiological Sciences Lab. Next, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH Intramural Research Program).

Her lab fosters a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative research environment, bringing together scientists with expertise in engineering, computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and medicine. Together, they focus on advancing functional neuroimaging methods to increase the understanding of human brain activity in health and disease. More precisely, using fMRI and EEG, they focus on understanding how time-varying changes in brain function relate to physiological and cognitive processes.
We had the pleasure of asking Dr. Chang a few questions about her work, research trajectory, and any advice she has for junior trainees. Read on to learn more!

Q1: Which research question excites you the most at the moment?
Catie Chang (CC): Spontaneous fMRI signals contain very rich dynamics. A question I’ve been intrigued by is, how can we push the boundaries in terms of information we can extract from these signals? Our current approaches have involved combining fMRI with complementary recordings of brain/body dynamics (such as EEG and physiological sensors) to model dynamic internal states and to understand their link with variations in behavior and cognition.

Q2: What advice do you have for junior trainees?
CC: One suggestion is to be open to new directions of collaboration, as these may end up shaping and expanding your work in unforeseen ways, and helping you to form new connections between ideas. Another thought I might add is: if you see something unexpected in your data, it may actually be something quite interesting to study:)

Q3: What are your plans for the next five years? What projects and research questions would you like to pursue?
CC: One of our broad goals has been to unravel different sources that drive BOLD fMRI signal fluctuations, and try to use these components in new ways. Some elements of BOLD signal variation -- including changes in how sleepy you are, as well as physiological processes like breathing and cardiac activity -- tend to be widely regarded as confounds. However, theseeffects may also provide valuable information about individual differences and disease. In this context, our work will continue developing computational methods for investigating fMRI signatures of alertness and autonomic states, by integrating machine learning together with multimodal functional imaging (e.g., simultaneous EEG-fMRI). We have also begun studies to probe the clinical value of these features, and I am excited to see where these studies will lead.

Edited by: Lavinia Uscătescu & Simon Steinkamp

OHBM AWARD WINNERS - 2023

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 21:54:51 GMT

Elisa Guma & the Communications Committee

Congratulations to the OHBM 2023 award winners .

Each year, the Organization for Human Brain Mapping recognizes members of the field of human brain imaging for their outstanding contributions to the field. We would like to congratulate this year’s awardees, who were recognized at the 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting.
Over the next few weeks we will be showcasing their contributions to the field through a series of blog posts.

The award recipients are listed below:

Diversity and Inclusivity Champion - Ruchika Prakash, for her contribution to increasing diversity and inclusivity within the field of human brian mapping.
Education in Neuroimaging Award - Janaina Mourao-Miranda, for her significant contribution to education and training in the field of neuroimaging.
Early Career Investigator Award - Catie Chang, for her significant contributions to the field of human brain mapping.
Fellow of OHBM - Aina Puce, Xi-Nian Zuo, and Karen Berman, for their outstanding academic and intellectual leadership in the disciplines represented by the Society over an extended period of time.
Glass Brain Award (lifetime achievement) - Michael Petrides, for leading researchers by using or facilitating neuroimaging to discover original and influential findings regarding the organization and function of the human brain.
Karl Zilles Award in Integrative Neuroscience - Justine Hansen, for her work in integrating modern neuroanatomical approaches with multi-model in-vivo neuroimaging.
Mentor Award - Olaf Sporns, for his leadership in developing early career researchers including undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral trainees.
Open Science Award - Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) Team, for the teams’ sustained and impactful efforts in the area of open science.
Replication Award - Charles Laidi, for the best replication study, highlighting OHBM’s commitment to reproducibility in neuroimaging research.

Editor’s Choice Awards

Laura V Cuaya received the Neuroimage award for her paper titled “Speech naturalness detection and language representation in the dog brain”
Nien-Chu Shih received the Neuroimage: Clinical award for her paper titled, "Microstructural mapping of dentate gyrus pathology in Alzheimer’s disease: A 16.4 Tesla MRI study".
Lanxin Ji received the Human Brain Mapping award for her paper titled “Fetal behavior during MRI changes with age and relates to network dynamics”
Eduarda Gervini Zampieri Centeno received the Brain Structure and Function award for her paper titled “A python hands-on tutorial on network and topological neuroscience”

Valentina Pacella was the runner up for the Brain Structure and Function for her paper titled “Motor awareness: a model based on neurological syndromes”

OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee 2023-2024 Election Results

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:16:19 GMT

Kangjoo Lee, Lucina Q. Uddin, Rosanna Olsen on behalf of the OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee

Overview of DIC committee 2023-2024 election procedure and results

The Diversity and Inclusivity Committee (DIC) at OHBM is dedicated to cultivating a diverse, engaged and inclusive international community of scientists conducting human brain research. To achieve this goal, DIC members collaborate to formulate a comprehensive plan to promote inclusivity across OHBM’s activities. The DIC’s approach involves investigating and implementing best practices suggested by current research on fostering inclusive environments. The committee develops new policies and programs aimed at creating a more inclusive environment, including leadership, education, and mentorship. These efforts are conducted in close collaboration with other OHBM committees and Special Interest Groups. Comprising 9-15 members, including the Chair and Chair-Elect, the DIC plays a pivotal role in shaping OHBM’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity. In the autumn of 2023, the DIC conducted two significant elections to further advance its mission.

The first election took place from September 24th to October 2nd. Here, we were pleased to fill four positions for the roles of graphic design officer, social media officer, and ad-hoc members for the 2023-2024 DIC term. We invited the OHBM public to apply for these positions. This opportunity attracted a remarkable response from our community, with a total of 55 applications submitted. These applications represented the rich spectrum of OHBM members, encompassing diverse backgrounds and career stages, ranging from graduate students to accomplished senior scientists. With the help of OHBM Executive Director, the 2022-2023 members of DIC voted on and elected our new members.
The second election took place from November 1st to 3rd, and the focus was on selecting a chair-elect from among two current DIC members. Election procedures, described in detail below, led to the identification of four exceptional new DIC members and our new chair-elect.

2023-2024 DIC new members: Joana Cabral (graphic design officer), Leyla Loued-Khenissi (ad-hoc member), Alyssa Pozzobon (ad-hoc member), and Jana Totzek (social media officer).
2023-2024 DIC Chair-elect: Sharna Jamadar

Joana Cabral is a research scientist at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute, University of Minho, Portugal. She is a Biomedical Engineer with a PhD in Computational Neuroscience and a postdoc in Psychiatry. She has developed several analysis and modeling algorithms to investigate the activity patterns detected with fMRI across conditions.

Leyla Loued-Khenissi is a Tunisian-American mother, cognitive neuroscientist and long-time brain mapper living and working on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. She currently holds a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Lausanne University Hospital. Her areas of interest focus on fMRI, uncertainty and predictive coding.

Alyssa Pozzobon is a PhD Student in Experimental Psychology with a focus in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. She has worked in the field of sleep neuroscience and memory for over 5 years. Her current research looks at the micro-architecture of sleep dependent memory consolidation in older adults with dementia and cognitive impairments.

Jana Totzek is a Ph.D. student in Mental Health at McGill University's Department of Psychiatry. She earned her B.Sc. in Psychology from Maastricht University in 2020 and went on to complete her M.Sc. in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at the same institution in 2022. As part of her M.Sc., she completed a research internship at the Douglas Research Centre in the CRISP group, where she is now pursuing her Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Martin Lepage and Dr. Katie M. Lavigne, focusing on psychosis, multimodal neuroimaging, and machine-learning.

A/Prof Sharna Jamadar is a cognitive neuroscientist based at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is broadly interested in how our life experiences confer resilience to the aging process. Sharna has developed a new approach to study brain connectivity on the basis of FDG-PET, called metabolic connectivity. She is also interested in parental neuroscience, and has proposed the novel hypothesis that parenthood contributes to cognitive reserve. She is a passionate advocate for diversity, inclusivity and accessibility in neuroscience.

New member election timeline:

08/29/2023	Initial Notification and Recruitment The OHBM Executive Director (ED) informed the OHBM DIC about the number of seats available for the 2023-2024 term. The DIC and ED initiated the recruitment process for open seats. The recruitment was advertised through the OHBM twitter and e-blast.
09/08/2023	Application Deadline.
09/20/2023	Review and Criteria Consideration The ED collected applications and transferred them to the DIC. The DIC evaluated the applications and established a set of criteria for candidate selection: Consideration of candidate’s availability for one of the four suggested positions To obtain gender and geographic diversity within the DIC To obtain career stage diversity within the DIC
09/24/2023	Voting Phase Ballot voting commenced to allow each 2022-2023 DIC member to identify candidates and suggested roles. It was not mandatory to suggest a role for every candidate. The list of 2022-2023 DIC members can be found at https://ohbm-dic.github.io/about_us/ourteam/.
10/02/2023	Ballot voting concluded. 58.3% of the DIC members voted.
10/18/2023	The ED reported the ballot results to the DIC chair.
10/20/2023	Final Selection The ED and DIC chair meeting to identify four finalists based on the number of votes received and the specific roles suggested during the ballot.
10/20/2023	Offer Notifications

Chair-elect election timeline:

09/20/2023	Initial Notification and Nomination (including self-nominations)
10/20/2023	Final Notification and Candidate Statements. A final notice for nominations was issued, along with a request for candidates to submit a statement (at least 3-5 sentences and no more than 1 page) outlining their qualifications and vision for the role.
10/31/2023	Final Candidate Statements Received.
11/01/2023	Voting Phase Ballot voting commenced. The ED sent two candidate statements to the DIC members. All DIC members, including new members and candidates, were allowed to vote in the election.
11/03/2023	Ballot voting concluded. 75% of the DIC members voted.
11/06/2023	The ED reported the ballot results to the DIC chair.
11/06/2023	Announcement of Results.

2023-2024 DIC members
Kangjoo Lee, United States - Chair
Sharna Jamader, Australia - Chair-Elect
Lucina Q. Uddin, United States - Past-Chair
Athina Tzovara, Switzerland - Subcommittee Chair - Gender
Tan Davynn, Singapore - Subcommittee Chair - Language and Culture
Tilak Ratnanather, United States - Subcommittee Chair - Accessibility
Alexander Barnett, Canada - Subcommittee Chair - Race and Ethnicity
Maryam Ziaei, Norway (Australia) - Subcommittee Chair - Career Level and Development
Christienne Gonzales Damatac, Netherlands - Subcommittee Chair - Socioeconomic Status
Lena Oestreich Australia - Subcommittee Chair - Mental Illness and Neurodiversity, BrainArt SIG Liaison
Julia Kam, Canada - FYM Officer
Fernanda Hansen Pacheco de Moraes, Brazil - Event Communication Officer
Joana Cabral, Portugal - Graphic Design Officer
Jana Totzek, Canada - Social Media Officer
Leyla Loued-Khenissi, Switzerland - Ad-hoc Member
Alyssa Pozzobon, Canada - Ad-hoc Member
Hiromasa Takemura, Japan - Council Liaison
Caroline Ahn, United States - Student and Postdoc SIG Liaison
Elisa Guma, United States - Communications Committee Liaison
Anibal Solon, United States - Open Science SIG Liaison
Linda Mah, Canada - Women PI SIG Liaison
*Rosanna Olsen, Canada - Guest, 2021-2022 Chair
*AmanPreet Badhwar, Canada - Guest, 2020-2021 Chair

* Guests are invited for a 1-year term when they are involved in the projects tied to the Committee. Guests are not eligible to participate in elections held by the Committee members.

Sustainability and Environmental Action SIG at OHBM 2023

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:57:39 GMT

Authors: Winson Yang, Irene Faiman, Peer Herholz, Nick Souter, Nikhil Bhagwat & Polona Kalc on behalf of the SEA-SIG
Lead Reviewer: Simon Steinkamp

SEA-SIG initiatives at the OHBM 2023 annual meeting.

OHBM's Sustainability and Environmental Action Special Interest Group (SEA-SIG) is a growing group of neuroimaging scientists endeavouring to reduce the environmental impact of (neuroimaging) research and promoting sustainable practices in our community.
We are active in three main areas:

The Annual Meeting Working Group advises OHBM on reducing the carbon footprint of the Annual Meeting. By assessing the environmental impact of the conference every year, we work toward more sustainable meeting models.

The Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Working Group brings together developers with a green future in mind. We're working on tools and ways for tracking and optimising energy costs of computational processes.

The Education and Outreach Working Group provides educational resources and disseminates them through community events. Our aim is to spark interest in sustainability-related topics in current and future neuroscientists.

OHBM 2023 SEA-SIG Symposium

Symposia provide a great platform for raising awareness about the environmental impacts of neuroimaging related activities while actively engaging with the OHBM public. This year’s symposium, entitled Actionable Neuroimaging-Focused Steps for Curbing Climate Change, intended to raise awareness on the impact of aviation on the OHBM community's carbon footprint. Furthermore, it offered practical recommendations for reducing the energy consumption of computing, and provided novel insights into brain correlates of environmentally-friendly behaviours in order to promote their engagement.
One characteristic of our symposia is the environmental consciousness of the presenters. Two of our four speakers provided recorded talks to avoid long-haul flights.

Our first in-person presenter, Heejung Jung, MSc., (Dartmouth College) discussed strategies for reducing the carbon impact of OHBM Annual Meetings. She focused on the role of air travel, concluding that hybrid events or geographical hubs appear to be the most sustainable options. The talk sparked an engaging and constructive discussion. One concern was that the Annual Meeting has a “poster-focused character”, so that alternative meeting formats would disproportionately impact early career researchers, who would have a more difficult time presenting their research and networking. While nothing can beat the networking opportunities of an in-person meeting, geographical hub gatherings or individual video chat-rooms of a hybrid event present more sustainable alternatives. Our latests paper on reducing the climate costs of OHBM thoroughly addresses these and similar concerns, and provides many solutions for successful sustainable meetings forms.

The second speaker, Dr. Stephanie Preston (University of Michigan), explored the link between brain evolution and sustainability issues. She showed how emotion-guided decision-making processes undermine environmentally-friendly behaviour, as people seek immediate gratification, discount the future, and focus on themselves. However, she suggests that by revising social norms, highlighting the joys of a balanced lifestyle, exposing people to nature, and considering future generations, behaviours can shift towards being more environmentally conscious.

Conservation philanthropy is an important part of preserving the planet, not only for future human generations, but also for other animals and plants. Dr. Nik Sawe (Stanford University) investigated the neural bases of conservation philanthropy, specifically, how neuroimaging can be used to predict the success of conservation messaging. He conducted a fMRI experiment where participants were shown images from National Geographic’s social media feed and were asked to make a donation towards conservation of the animal in represented in the picture. He demonstrated that activity in brain circuits associated with anticipatory affect and valuation (the nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex) predicts individual engagement and donations for wildlife preservation.

Finally, Dr. Nick Souter (University of Sussex) presented how to measure the carbon footprint of MRI analysis steps and pipelines, and shared tips for greener neuroimaging computing. For those who missed the talk, check out the preprint providing ten actionable recommendations for neuroimaging researchers to reduce the carbon footprint of their research computing. You can also see one of these recommendations summarised in this brief video!

Year after year, we observe a growing interest in our work from members of the OHBM community. After our first two symposia with about 50 participants, our third symposium engaged more than 70 attendees interested in environmental responsibility in neuroimaging. This year's limited hybrid meeting option substantially limited the opportunity to engage with the speakers who were not present in-person. Therefore, we will continue to advocate for a hybrid format for future meetings.

SEA-SIG Socials: Picnic
Topics and concerns related to sustainability in science can also be discussed informally during our social events. Even the most dispiriting issues become more palatable with a delicious plant-based meal in the company of like-minded people. Our picnics at the Annual Meetings are gradually turning into a tradition. This year, 30 SEA-SIG supporters were brainstorming on neuroimaging and sustainability over plant-based bowls from Liv Salades. We were pleasantly surprised by the large interest as we almost ran out of food! Unfortunately, we had to keep the event brief because of the tight conference schedule. However, we will repeat a similar short but sweet community gathering online in October (this time with virtual food for thought) for all of those who could not join us in person. Stay tuned for more information.

Local Transport Passes
Montréal is famous for its excellent sustainable public transport options, which we wanted to endorse and render them more accessible for attendees with limited travel budgets. We proposed a pilot program of distributing local transport passes for commuting in the city. The transport pass included 7 days of unlimited bus and metro travel in Montréal as well as access to the airport shuttle. Together with the Student and Postdoc SIG and the OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee, we sponsored three hundred passes which were freely distributed to trainees and students at the conference with priority to attendees from Low and Lower-Middle Income Countries. This initiative promoted the use of sustainable modes of transport (public busses and metro vs taxis or carshares), while supporting attendees from low and middle income countries. The proposed program was successful beyond our expectations! You can see the survey results we launched for this program below. All transport passes were handed out and the feedback we received gave us confirmation that we are well on our way of our sustainability mission – merging environmentally responsible transport and increasing accessibility and inclusivity of the Annual Meetings.

Some of the feedback:
● “Member of SP SIG, thanks so much for this great initiative :)”
● Fantastic initiative! You should do this again next year!
● I used the metro/bus for all of my travel within Montreal (other than on foot) and was so appreciative of the metro pass!! This is a phenomenal offering, especially for trainees, and I hope it is available at future meetings!!

If you’re interested in supporting or joining us, please get in touch with us on the SEA-SIG channels: https://mattermost.ohbm-environment.org/home/channels/town-square. Follow us on Twitter: @OhbmEnvironment or email us to join our mailing list: ohbm.sea.sig@gmail.com
Let’s work together towards a greener HBM and world!

OHBM Women Faculty Launch+: A Digest and Lessons from Our First In-person Meeting at OHBM 2023 in Montreal

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:28:55 GMT

Audrey Fan

OHBM Women Faculty Launch at 2023 Annual Meeting in Monreal

Lead reviewer: Lavinia Uscatescu

The primary mission of the OHBM Women Faculty Special Interest Group (WF-SIG) is to help women principal investigators (PIs) connect and network with each other. Peer-to-peer networking is an effective, low-cost intervention that encourages female neuroscientists to collaborate in cross-disciplinary teams and overcome gender-related challenges (1). Our official in-person launch event at this year's annual OHBM meeting marks the first step towards connecting and empowering women-led research teams in the neuroimaging community.

Logo Design: Jingyuan Chen, Arts Officer
At the launch event, we unveiled the new logo that was crafted for the OHBM Women Faculty SIG by our Arts Officer, Dr. Jingyuan Chen (Assistant Professor, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging).

I designed the background connectivity graph first, referencing the ideas of other OHBM SIGs,” Dr. Chen described. “The connectivity graph captures both brain mapping and community.” She is also proud of the racial and ethnic diversity of the women faculty figures. “I hope the logo conveys how women faculty from diverse cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds can work together as a community to provide peer support and address common challenges faced by women PIs in the human neuroimaging field.

WF-SIG Launch Event, OHBM 2023
We officially launched the WF-SIG at the OHBM 2023 meeting in Montreal. The launch event was led by the inaugural chair of the SIG, Dr. Jean Chen (Professor, University of Toronto) and attracted more than 100 members of the OHBM. More than half the attendees were faculty, and the rest comprised junior women researchers, and allies. Dr. Chen introduced her vision for the OHBM WF-SIG to be an organization that promotes equity and inclusion in science, while offering support and learning opportunities. By advocating for the recognition of women neuroscientists, our aim is to create a future in which women faculty in OHBM will thrive and achieve their scientific goals and impact.

We then introduced the executive team of the SIG (check out this blog post to learn about the initial members):
●      Dr. Molly Bright (Secretary, Northwestern University),
●      Dr. Hyang Woon Lee (Chair-Elect, Ewha Womans University),
●      Dr. Ruchika Prakash (Secretary-Elect, Ohio State University),
●      Dr. Marta Garrido (Past Social-Events Officer, University of Melbourne),
●      Dr. Linda Mah (Diversity and Inclusion Officer, University of Toronto),
●      Dr. Jingyuan Chen (Arts Officer, Harvard Medical School),
●      and Dr. Audrey Fan (Communications Officer, University of California Davis).

Our advisors are Dr. Aina Puce (Professor, Indiana University) and Dr. Randy Gollub (Professor, Harvard Medical School).

Keynote speaker: Randy Gollub
Dr. Randy Gollub, the past OHBM Council Chair and a current Advisor of the WF-SIG, served as the keynote speaker to welcome the attendees. She shared her own research journey and leadership roles, emphasizing how OHBM has been a throughline in her career.

My work spans so many domains and technologies,” Dr. Gollub remarked, “that [OHBM] is where I can find the best people with whom I can do the things I want to do.” Through her experiences in this interdisciplinary community, Dr. Gollub finds that one of her central roles is propelling others into successful leadership positions. In her own journey, she has leveraged leadership roles to make the meaningful changes that she believed in. For instance, she decided to serve on the Program Committee in 2013-2016 to ensure that translational neuroscience would receive its due emphasis at OHBM meetings. She also initiated the formation of the Communications Committee in 2015 as a hub for communication within the organization and public engagement.

From these experiences, Dr. Gollub’s advised women PIs to make themselves as visible as possible, whether through traditional or atypical means. She also advised women PIs to attend every meeting prepared, such that if an opportunity arises to effect change, they will have the necessary information with which to speak up.

Interactive networking at the launch meeting
Sparked by the keynote and the ensuing discussion, participants were encouraged to interact in real time through the Menti app. Through these interactions, the SIG solicited discussion and feedback on unique challenges and opportunities for women PIs, as well as the topics and activities that the SIG should pursue. The attendees were geographically diverse (spanning 4 continents and over 10 countries) and revealed the majority of faculty attendees to hold a position of Associate Professor or higher.

Participants were also encouraged to form at least one new connection and to make concrete plans for follow-up interactions. The goal of this one-on-one interaction was to foster a deeper sense of community, emphasizing that each female scientist is not alone and without support.

Broadening our impact: mailing list and follow-up
A key takeaway from the SIG launch is that many participants are not yet PIs. In follow-up discussions, the SIG executive committee therefore unanimously voted to also involve non-PI women in appropriate SIG events. We believe this will benefit women OHBM members across all career levels, and foster mentorship. We have now included Dr. Naomi Gaggi (New York University), the new chair of the Student-Postdoc SIG, as the trainee representative, to share the perspectives of “up-and-coming scientist” with the WF-SIG. Furthermore, Dr. Sharna Jamadar (Associate Professor, Monash University) has also joined as the new Social-Events Officer.

“This really matters to me, as my pre-faculty self would have immensely benefited from being active in that room,” shared SIG secretary, Dr. Molly Bright (Assistant Professor, Northwestern University). Dr. Bright is spearheading a mailing list that is inclusive of diverse membership levels. To receive updates about the SIG, OHBM members can subscribe to the email list by clicking here.

Further Insights: Suggestions for future events
There have been various proposals for future activities, such as regular online meetings or satellite events, especially at the next year’s OHBM conference in Seoul in June 2024. We are always open to any new ideas.

Lead reviewer: Lavinia

Best Practices in Scientific Writing with Dr. Bradley Voytek: A Workshop Hosted by the Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT

Naomi Gaggi

Scientific writing workshop by Bradley Voytek, hosted by the SP-SIG

On April 27th, 2023, OHBM’s Student–Postdoc Special Interest Group hosted a workshop on best practices in scientific writing with Dr. Bradley Voytek. Dr. Voytek is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, and the Neurosciences Graduate Program at UC San Diego. He is a strong advocate for science communication and outreach, and he has engaged with audiences as diverse as Scientific American, National Public Radio, and San Diego Comic-Con. The event covered a range of topics related to scientific writing, the different forms of scientific outreach, and ways to frame our scientific work for communicating with the public. Overall, there were three main takeaways from his talk: 1) practice communicating your science and engaging different audiences, 2) embrace your journey, and 3) find your niche, have fun with your work, and dive right in!

Scientific Communication and Engagement. Dr. Voytek engaged the audience by sharing his journey with scientific writing and outreach. His first piece of advice was that the audience matters and you should tailor your message to the values of the listener. With his experience writing on topics as diverse as data science to zombie brains, Dr Voytek underscored that different audiences will approach neuroscience findings from their own unique vantage points. Understanding the nuances between presenting your science to different audiences and under different scenarios is key—for instance, how you would describe your work to an aunt at a family dinner, compared to how you’d describe it to a fellow scientist at a conference would be quite different (provided your aunt is not a neuroscientist). Neuroscience holds particular public power, fascinating many, thus being able to talk about your science clearly and effectively and in various settings is very important. A good way to practice this is by creating “elevator pitches” for different scenarios. This can help with longer versions of these pitches and is good practice for tailoring your scientific message.

Embrace your journey. Dr. Voytek discussed his personal experiences with interviews and writing scientific pieces in newspapers and magazines. He also talked about his own academic journey. After receiving his PhD at UC Berkeley, he joined Uber as their first data scientist where he helped build their data science team. His current research focuses on both neuroscience and data science. He combines large-scale data science and machine learning to study how brain regions communicate with one another, and how that communication changes with aging and disease.

He stressed the importance of finding your niche and that you continue to gain experience over time. It can be a very slow process, but “just because you hit a roadblock doesn’t mean you should give up”. Along any successful journey, there are failures, however, these are not often discussed; to draw attention to setbacks, and how to deal with them, Dr. Voytek suggests reading this Nature article titled CV of failures. He said that it is a privilege to communicate the honest journey of your work and experiences that were part of his path to success, but felt like such a failure at the time. He continued by sharing that people may be impacted by your honesty about your scientific journey, and that feedback from those individuals can be extremely rewarding and motivating in your future journey. He recommended two support articles regarding the importance of scientific communication and how it may provide support to students who may not have the qualities that are easily showcased on exams and interviews [1,2]. From this workshop, it was very clear that being open about your journey is extremely rewarding and can help individuals at any career level.

Find your niche, have fun with your work and dive right into it! Having fun with your work and telling stories is important in science. A fun project that turned into a huge success was Dr. Voytek’s book, co-authored with Dr. Timothy Verstynen, "Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?", which also turned into a poster presentation and even a TEDEd talk. He explained the functional localization of the brain using zombie behaviors as examples. Through this medium, he was able to teach neuroscience in an accurate but publicly accessible way using pop culture’s perennial fascination with zombies.
He suggested another way to demystify complex neuroscience ideas is through social media. This leads to a cycle of communication and outreach of new ideas, demystification, exposure and networking, and then more communication. In more formal communications of your science (e.g., manuscripts), Dr. Voytek suggested this resource as simple rules for structuring papers.

No matter the context in which you are communicating your science, he suggested that a scientist should: 1) find your voice based on your personal journey, 2) find a niche that sets you apart, and 3) dive right in. There are so many different platforms to communicate your science and you should take advantage of your skills. Although there can be some negative connotations in being involved in public communication, education, and outreach, such as taking time away from your lab work, being involved in different types of scientific outreach can actually enhance your success by improving your communication skills and public engagement. Overall, Dr. Voytek’s talk was fantastic and it was packed with tons of information and resources! If you missed the workshop, please check out the video on the OHBM SP-SIG Youtube channel.

Edited by: Alexandra Samson & ComCom team

OHBM 2023 Public Lectures In Montréal on July 18

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 19:29:57 GMT

Communications Committee Lay Media team

Invitation to public events on brain imaging science (English and French language)

On Tuesday, July 18, local neuroscientists from Quebec universities will speak about the fascinating research on brain imaging. Talks will be delivered in English and French, and are free to the general public.

More details are provided below. You are invited to attend and to share this invitation with anyone who might be interested in this event.

Place: Grande Bibliothèque (475 Boul. de Maisonneuve E, Montréal, at Berri-UQAM metro station)
Date: Tuesday July 18, 2023
Time (talks in French): 6:00 pm (doors open at 5:30 pm)
Time (talks in English): 8:00 pm (doors open at 7:30 pm)
Tickets: free, but limited numbers available! Register quickly using the link below.

Register for French lectures: imagerieducerveau.eventbrite.ca
Register for English lectures: brainimaging.eventbrite.ca

Talks are aimed at the general public, and for each language session, there will be three talks of around 20 minutes, along with a Q&A session after.

Talks in English will be given by:
Dr. Alan Evans (A hitch-hiker's guide to mapping the brain)
Dr. Emily Coffey (Altering sleep and memory with sound)
Dr. Robert Zatorre (The neuroscience of music and why we love it)

Talks in French will be given by:
Dr. Sylvain Baillet (Tempête dans la boîte crânienne !)
Dr. Delphine Raucher-Chéné (Apports de la neuroimagerie en psychiatrie : en quoi étudier le cerveau nous aide à mieux comprendre les problèmes de santé mentale ?)
Dr. Anne Gallagher (Toute la lumière sur le développement du cerveau)

Invitation à un événement publique sur la science de l'imagerie du cerveau.

Le mardi 18 juillet, des neuroscientifiques d'universités québécoises présenteront les recherches liées au fascinant domaine de l'imagerie du cerveau. Les conférences seront données en anglais et en français, et sont gratuites pour le grand public.

Plus de détails sont fournis ci-dessous et dans les affiches ci-jointes. Vous êtes invités à y assister et à partager cette invitation avec toute personne susceptible d'être intéressée par cet événement.

Place : Grande Bibliothèque (475 Boul. de Maisonneuve E, Montréal, à la station de métro Berri-UQAM)
Date de l'événement : mardi 18 juillet 2023
Heure (conférences en français) : 18h00 (ouverture des portes à 17h30)
Heure (conférences en anglais) : 20h00 (ouverture des portes à 19h30)
Billets : gratuits, mais en nombre limité ! Enregistrez-vous rapidement en utilisant le site ci-dessous.

Billets pour les conférences en français : imagerieducerveau.eventbrite.ca
Billets pour les conférences en anglais : brainimaging.eventbrite.ca

Les conférences s'adressent au grand public et chaque session linguistique comprendra trois conférences d'environ 20 minutes, suivies d'une séance de questions-réponses.

Les conférences en français seront données par :
Dr. Sylvain Baillet ( Tempête dans la boîte crânienne ! )
Dre. Delphine Raucher-Chéné ( Apports de la neuroimagerie en psychiatrie : en quoi étudier le cerveau nous aide à mieux comprendre les problèmes de santé mentale ? )
Dre. Anne Gallagher ( Toute la lumière sur le développement du cerveau )

Les conférences en anglais seront données par :
Dr. Alan Evans ( A hitch-hiker's guide to mapping the brain )
Dre. Emily Coffey ( Altering sleep and memory with sound )
Dr. Robert Zatorre ( The neuroscience of music and why we love it )

Committee and Special Interest Group activities at the 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:16:19 GMT

OHBM's many committees and Special Interest Groups

Community-led events at #OHBM2023

The 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting is fast approaching! In addition to the fantastic scientific content organized by the Program Committee, many other committees and special interest groups (SIGs) host their own programs. At last year’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow, committees and SIGs hosted events on inclusivity, mentorship, art, and much more.

Read on to learn about upcoming committee and SIG events at OHBM 2023!

And don't forget to check out our latest Neuroscience podcast episode, where Peter Bandettini and Alfie Wearn talk about these events! You can find it at your favorite podcast service here and on YouTube here.

Brain-Art SIG
By: Xinhui Li, Giulia Baracchini

This year we will be holding the BrainArt Exhibition, BrainArt Competition, and activities for children under the theme “The Multifaceted Brain: Adaptation and Diversity”.

BrainArt Exhibition. The BrainArt exhibition will be held at the Poster and Exhibit Hall (Room 220 ABC) during the OHBM annual meeting and highlight 16 artworks including still images, videos and sculptures. These artworks will explore the topics about adaptation and diversity across cultures, diversity of human sexuality as well as neurodiversity. Check out our website to learn more about our special theme and a list of featured artists: https://ohbm-brainart.github.io/exhibit.html

BrainArt Competition. The BrainArt competition is now open to the public! We accept submissions across five categories including 1) the multifaceted brain: adaptation and diversity, 2) pictures to prose, 3) still images, 4) videos and animations, and 5) beautiful mistakes. We will announce the public vote and judges vote winners for each category at the meeting. Please consider submitting your art to the competition: https://ohbm-brainart.github.io/competition.html

BrainArt for the scientists of the future. On Sunday July 23 from 10:30am to 11:30am in the Poster and Exhibit Hall, we will also be offering activities for children, in multiple languages, around neuroimaging and the topic of our exhibition. Children will have the opportunity to learn about the brain in creative and playful ways. Spots are limited, so make sure to register here!

If you would like to keep up with us more regularly, you can:

visit our website: https://ohbm-brainart.github.io/
follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/OHBM_BrainArt
follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ohbm_basig

Finally, we are always happy to connect and collaborate. If you’d like to reach out to us, we’ll be glad to hear from you at ohbm.brainart@gmail.com.

Diversity and Inclusivity Committee (DIC)
By: Eduardo Garza-Villarreal

The 5th annual DIC Symposium titled “Using technology to enhance diversity and inclusivity in neuroscience and neuroimaging” will include a diverse panel of speakers: Tilak Ratnanather, Jasmine Kwasa, Arnelle Etienne, and Parisa Zakavi.

The 4th edition of the Kids Live Review features talks dedicated to children speaking Bengali, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Mandarin Simplified, Chinese Mandarin Traditional (Taiwan), Marathi, Portuguese, and Spanish. Check out the website for more info: https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/

There will be a Diversity & Inclusivity Roundtable titled “Advancing multiple dimensions of diversity at OHBM” organized by Rosanna Olsen, Fernando Barrios, Fernanda Hansen Pacheco de Moraes, Hyang Woon Lee, Kangjoo Lee, Pradeep Raamana, Lucina Uddin, and Maryam Ziaei, where we wish to gain insights into OHBM members’ experiences and needs at the OHBM annual meeting in terms of diversity.

Education Committee
By: Jeanette Mumford

We had some amazing options to choose from for this year’s Educational Courses! We’ve chosen a mix of newer courses and popular favorites that have evolved a bit each year. So many fantastic speakers! Want to move beyond blobology, improve your QC practices, learn about artificial neural networks, learn whether physiological signal is your friend or foe, peek into some white matter, or learn about whole-brain connectomes? Check out the full day courses. Half day courses cover reproducible neuroimaging, meta analysis, and neuroanatomy, and if you’re excited about excitation and inhibition, we’ve got you covered.

Remember, you can go to multiple courses throughout the day. Get more of the details here: https://www.humanbrainmapping.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4204

Open Science (OS-) SIG
By: Johanna Bayer

Hey there, Open Science enthusiasts! The Open Science SIG team is thrilled to invite you to two exciting events happening this July: Brainhack and the Open Science Room. Get ready for an immersive online and onsite experience in beautiful Montreal!

First up, from July 19th to 21st, brace yourself for the 8th edition of Brainhack, a well-known neuroimaging and neuroscience hackathon. This event brings together brilliant minds from around the globe to collaborate on cutting-edge projects. Witness the incredible impact of Brainhack, showcased in the "Proceeding of the OHBM Brainhack 2021" article, featuring groundbreaking projects like automated MRI data quality control and an interactive virtual reality platform. We're also committed to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusiveness, with activities and resources in place to support participants from developing countries and individuals with disabilities. While the in-person event is fully booked, the simultaneous virtual event is available to everyone. Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity!

In parallel with OHBM 2023, we present the Open Science Room (OSR). This year's OSR will delve into new and emerging topics, open science concerns, and the bigger picture. Come engage in panel discussions, table talks, and emergent sessions, covering open publishing, code standardization, open data governance, the intersection of neuroscience and telehealth, and the implications of large open data repositories. Community input is vital, so we encourage you to contribute topic suggestions and self-nominate as speakers. As a bonus, the Open Science SIG presents a symposium on "Open Science - sustainability through success stories," sharing inspiring tales of how open science practices have positively impacted careers and the neuroscience community. The OSR is a welcoming and inclusive space for collaboration and connection.

To discover more about these thrilling events, visit our OSSIG website. We're also seeking volunteers and future team members, so don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to be a part of the action!

Mark your calendars and get ready for an unforgettable experience. We can't wait to see you there!

Best regards,
The Open Science SIG team

Student-Postdoc (SP-) SIG
By: Lei Zhang

The SP SIG will be maintaining many anticipated traditional events whilst initiating exciting new activities!

Monday Night Social. Since OHBM 2010 in Barcelona, the Monday Night Social has gathered the OHBM community for a fun and light-hearted social over food and drinks to bring out the human nature of this scientific community. It can only be more exciting in Montreal (July 24, 2023)!

Lunch with Mentors. As a part of the SP-SIG’s initiatives, the “Lunch with Mentors” event each year continues to be oversubscribed and in large demand indicating the importance of this event to OHBM trainees. This year on July 23, 2023, OHBM trainees will again have extensive opportunities to engage in informal conversations on research skills and career development with both new and established PIs, as well as industry experts. The aim of the event is to inspire and motivate the next generation of OHBM researchers, giving them an opportunity to learn from the experiences of the invited mentors.

#NewPI roundtable (new this year!). The transition from junior researcher to independent scientist is a critical and often neglected issue. This roundtable on July 24, 2023, seeks to equip early career researchers with the knowledge, skills, and strategies needed to make the transition to independence in academia and empower them to confidently pursue their scientific goals. All are invited!

If you would like to keep up with us more regularly, you can:

visit our website: https://www.ohbmtrainees.com/
follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/OHBM_Trainees
follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ohbm-sig/
follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp-BBXDrtx89uFT4Tz7uK5A
follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OHBMStudentandPostdocSection/

Sustainability and Environment Action (SEA-) SIG
By: Winson Yang

This year, the SEA-SIG will be holding their third symposium, entitled “Actionable neuroimaging-focused steps we can take to curb climate change.” Speakers will be presenting empirical work that can help us take practical steps towards reducing the effects that climate change will have on us in the future. We will discuss how we can make fMRI preprocessing pipelines less resource-intensive, lessons from psychological research on the decisions people make that can undermine sustainability goals, and much more! The symposium will be held in Room 513 on Sunday, July 23, from 2:15–3:30pm.

Additionally, come and join us in the sunshine at the SEA-SIG picnic on Tuesday the 25th between 12–1 pm. This will be a great opportunity to chat with other OHBM members interested in sustainability whilst enjoying a sandwich or two. The picnic will be held in the vicinity of the conference center. The precise location will be confirmed soon—stay tuned!

You can also find more information about our OHBM2023 events on our website: https://ohbm-environment.org/ohbm-2023/

We look forward to seeing you there!

Women in OHBM SIG
By: Jean Chen

Our SIG's first annual meeting is on Monday evening at 5:15pm in 512 A-D. All women faculty and leaders that want to support women faculty are welcome to attend. Coffee and cookies will be served.

[Editor’s note: For more details on OHBM’s newest SIG, check out our recent blog post introducing the Women in OHBM SIG.]

Communications Committee (ComCom)
By: Elizabeth DuPre

As the annual meeting approaches, we’re looking forward to connecting and communicating our science in-person once again! As Helen Longino argued, science is social knowledge; OHBM annual meeting is thus an important venue for driving the field forward.

To help launch the conversation, ComCom is leading a series of initiatives:

Keynote Interview Series In the lead up to the annual meeting, we are continuing our tradition of sharing interviews with each of this year’s keynote presenters on the blog; for example, you can find our interview with last year’s speaker Janaina Mourao-Miranda here. For the first time, several of these will also be jointly released as special podcast mini-episodes!

Live Podcast Event While you may primarily know ComCom for our behind-the-scenes work (like delivering this blog post!), we hope to see many members in-person for our live podcast episode recording! Continuing last year’s inaugural event, we will be hosting a discussion during the annual meeting on individual difference research in human brain mapping. Our current podcast team lead, Alfie Wearn, will lead what promises to be an exciting discussion, so stop by Room 513 on Monday, July 24, from 12:30 pm—2:00 pm to join the conversation!

For the first time this year, we will also be co-sponsoring a Public Lecture series just before the annual conference ! Featuring talks from six Montreal-based OHBM members, these public lectures are intended to engage the local community—in each of Montreal’s two official languages, English and French—and share our excitement for human brain mapping with the general public. You can find more information on the English event here and the French event here.

From all the committees and SIGs listed here: We wish all our members a great experience at the 2023 annual meeting.

A Conversation with Bharat Biswal (OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Pt. 8)

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT

Rahul Gaurav & Naomi L. Gaggi

Looking at the past and future of functional connectivity

Dr. Bharat B. Biswal is a distinguished professor in Biomedical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he serves as director for the Center for Brain Imaging and leads the Brain Connectivity Lab. He received his doctorate in biophysics from the Medical College of Wisconsin, following a masters from Michigan Technical University and a bachelors of science in electrical engineering from Utkal University in India.

Dr. Biswal is well-known for his seminal work in functional connectivity and continues his research in brain connectivity and signal processing using MRI. He is also a familiar guest on the NeuroSalience Podcast, having been featured in Season 3, Episode 5 in conversation with his former labmate Dr. Peter Bandettini.

In this interview, Rahul Gaurav and Naomi L. Gaggi talked with Dr. Biswal as a keynote speaker for the upcoming 2023 Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference in Montreal, Canada. They cover his academic journey, his research, and the potential future of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Rahul Gaurav (RG): Welcome Dr. Biswal, it is an absolute honor to have you here. Thank you very much for your time. Could you please tell us about your early career?

Bharat Biswal (BB): I studied electrical engineering in India. Then I came to the US to complete my master’s in electrical engineering, specifically in signal processing. I was interested in a PhD, so a friend of mine who was there at that time said that I should go and meet this famous physicist Jim Hyde. So, I decided to do a PhD in medical imaging.

RG: How difficult was it in those days to integrate into a foreign lab?

BB: Coming from India, it was a big culture shock in terms of food and so on. However, students are more open-minded. I never felt like a foreigner in the lab. We talked about science and about our struggles. My struggle was what I wanted to cook and eat, especially Indian food. I didn’t have as many options compared to now. I got to know about other cultures quite well. I had friends from France, Switzerland, and many countries. When I first landed at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, there was a lot of snow. Before my flight landed, I saw all of these swimming pools and thought so many people had swimming pools in their houses. The way they interact with snow in Bollywood movies was very different than the way it was when I saw snow. I would say I was very lucky.

RG: What obstacles did you face while developing your career?

BB: When I wrote the resting state paper there was a lot of criticism. Reviewers and others who had initially read the paper made the assumption that I was wrong. They could not pinpoint where I was wrong, but they thought that I was wrong. And that’s a very difficult situation to be in because you have to constantly prove that you’re not wrong. To this day, I still feel that some people think there is a mistake somewhere that I have made. That was the biggest challenge I faced in terms of my research. Other than that, I was in a very good lab and I had very good fellow graduate students. Many of them are now ‘who’s who’ in fMRI. I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time when fMRI started.

RG: How did the idea of the functional connectivity paper come to you?

BB: I chose signal processing as my topic as a graduate student. I had read that if you do a specific task then the respiration rate changes a little bit. So, I thought maybe that was something I could also look at. Other people were looking at auditory tasks, motor tasks, etc. I thought if I could come up with a method that could help to understand the physiological sources, then this could better characterize the task.

In engineering, the best way to describe a system is to provide a random noise as the input. I thought that random noise could be something like a resting state. I would make the subject do certain tasks and also make them rest for about 7 minutes. Even when I removed the respiration and cardiac signal, I still saw that there was a large signal variation in the low frequency. Then, I wondered what would happen if I took a signal from the motor region and correlated it. During rest, I saw that the sensorimotor region was lighting up after correlation.

My colleagues thought it was very interesting and one of my mentors suggested that I should drop everything else I was doing and focus on this. This was my first experiment as a graduate student and my paper got rejected by 4 journals. It was painful as other students were publishing in high profile journals by doing motor tasks.

RG: Did you have many supportive people around you?

BB: My advisor was Jim Hyde and his other student was Peter Bandettini, who is now really famous. There were also many others who have been very successful. Jim was a physicist by training, so my research was supported by him even when others said it couldn’t be true. He always supported me, and I was very lucky to be his student. He taught me that if you can do an experiment and replicate it, just write how the experiment was done—that is all that is needed.

RG: Do you believe your paper on resting state fMRI was your most important contribution to the field?

BB: Maybe that’s my most important work because it was such a simple idea and so many people have taken it to the next level. There’s also another paper about the functional connectome that is equally important, where we asked everyone who was able to share their data, and we were able to analyze more than 1,000 subjects. We put all of the scripts on a public forum. It helped to push journals to ask for data and scripts to be published to be used by others. Data sharing has now become so common.

RG: If you could roll back the clock, what would you do differently?

BB: I would have tried to write the functional connectivity analysis as a software package and put it online. I would have also tried to resubmit and refine our rejected papers.

RG: Where do you see the future of functional connectivity going?

BB: I would not have imagined the amount of success that functional connectivity has had. It has far exceeded my wildest imagination. It’s hard for me to predict, but I see researchers using multimodal imaging to better understand functional connectivity.

RG: Do you have any advice for early career researchers?

BB: Being a postdoc and a student is the best time. This is the time where you can take a lot of risks. Even if you make a big mistake, you are still learning and no one will fault you. This is a really good time to be in research. Everything is so accessible, but this also makes the field very competitive. After COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, people are starting to again get together and share ideas face-to-face.

A Conversation with Xujun Duan (OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview #7)

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:14:27 GMT

Lavinia Uscătescu, with editing by Xinhui Li

Capturing the complex activity of the social brain

Dr. Xujun Duan is a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China. She obtained her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, with Dr. Vinod Menon as one of her supervisors and mentors. She has extensive research expertise with multimodal and computational neuroimaging methods, which she employs to study the social brain of people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

In her 2023 OHBM keynote address, she will highlight some of her recent results developing extensive neuroimaging and neurostimulation protocols in a population of autistic children. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), she stimulated structures of the social brain (i.e. the parts of the brain responsible for processing information related to social interactions and cues) and followed this up with both neuroimaging and clinical assessments.

In this interview, Dr. Xujun Duan discusses how she overcame the challenges of implementing a research protocol that would adequately capture the complex activity of the social brain, as well as the rewarding moments she enjoyed during this process. Additionally, she offers career advice for early stage researchers who plan on pursuing an academic path.

Lavinia Uscătescu (LU): Regarding the data that you will present at OHBM, it will be along the lines of one of your current projects looking at potential treatments for autistic children. Could you please give me a little bit more insight into that?

Xujun Duan (XD): So briefly, I'm going to introduce our brain imaging study of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and our major findings, and then the most important thing is that I'm going to report the very exciting results that we have for the personalized MRI-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatment for autistic kids.

LU: Fascinating. Sounds like a very complex paradigm. So your treatment focuses on applying TMS, is that correct? And how exactly have you come up with this protocol? Is it something you've validated in your previous research?

XD: Yes, it comes from our previous study (reviewed here), as well as the literature showing that stimulating the social brain might potentially modulate and induce neuroplasticity, and thus might have potential impact on the social deficits of ASD. So that's our hypothesis.

LU: And at the end of the protocol, how exactly do you measure, for example, the improvements in social communication?

XD: We measured the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) improvements. And we found improvement in social interaction and communication, as well as repetitive behaviors. We used eye tracking to measure their fixation on social stimuli, and it did improve. We also recorded structural and functional brain imaging, because we aim to look at the amygdala, and we found that after the stimulation, the amygdala activation and connectivity of the autistic kids significantly decreased. So it makes us feel confident that the stimulation is reliable, and may really give some effective improvement for them.

LU: Fascinating! And congratulations on your work! And because by now you are an established, accomplished researcher, could you please share some of those challenges that you've had to overcome throughout your career? What advice would you give to young people who aspire to a career in neuroscience?

XD: I do have some advice to the postdocs or young researchers in the field. The first advice that I'm going to give is to choose a research area that you're really interested in, and will be willing to dedicate your life to work for it. And I think this is very important, because the focus and persistence can help you accumulate knowledge and experience and build your academic reputation.

The second advice I'm trying to give is to build good cooperative relationships with others. You know, I'm working in biomedical engineering, and working on autism brain imaging studies. And I need to cooperate with the child health care center, and autism treatment institutes. So without them, I cannot recruit subjects and conduct a clinical trial. And previously, most of my study was based on the ABIDE data set, so I don’t think that doing research on open data versus your own data set is less valuable. But if you want to promote your research and do clinical application, you need to build up your own system.

And I think the third piece of advice that I'm trying to give is that you should build your own team, with team members that have similar goals and values as you, and those can be your students, your postdocs, or your research assistants. But they really need to have similar goals. When I look back on it, I think the most support I get is from my PhD students. And I think the most important quality they have is their passion for autism research.

LU: There was another thing that you mentioned that I became intrigued about: you mentioned that you started actually by studying biomedical engineering. So how did you decide to do autism research after all?

XD: Yes, I majored in biomedical engineering from my bachelor’s degree to PhD, and because this is kind of a multidisciplinary major where we apply engineering principles to solve medical problems. So I am really interested in the neural mechanism and computer aided diagnosis or effective intervention of ASD.

LU: One aspect that relates to psychiatric interventions, which you mentioned before and that I'm sure you can also see with the children that you test, is that autism is such a heterogeneous umbrella diagnosis. Is there a way that you thought about how to approach this? For example, in further dissecting your results, have you noticed perhaps certain sub clusters within the group that you test?

XD: Yes, I always think about that. It's really a critical question and actually I prefer the spectrum approach, because that is how the ASD diagnosis is defined, but actually in practice, we can really observe that there do exist some subtypes, like some of the ASD kids have verbal abilities, some do not. And some of them have an average or even higher IQ level, but others have lower IQ. And some of them have social withdrawal and some are hypersensitive.

LU: So that is truly a challenge that you see firsthand, and it manifests at all levels. I also wanted to touch on the cultural aspects that might be relevant here because we talk about communication patterns, right, that are atypical in autism. So I'm wondering if there are cultural aspects that influenced the way these are perceived or diagnosed in China versus the US, for example. Have you noticed any of that? Can you give me some insight?

XD: Yeah, I think there are cultural differences for ASD research. In the US, I think, you can recruit more so-called “high functioning”* participants, right? But in China, I found it very difficult to recruit such populations. Because in China, there is a difference in parents’ attitudes, or the support from society, so if the child is able to go into the mainstream school [system], the parents are not willing to let others know that they have an autistic kid. So most of our subjects are so-called “low functioning”, who cannot go to the mainstream school and cannot take care of themselves in daily life, but their parents are so eager for them to participate in the research to seek any potential help.

*Note: “high-functioning” is an informal way to refer to autistic individuals who are generally characterized by less prominent intellectual disability. This is not an official clinical category, and its validity, as reflected by its assumed reflection of specific cognitive abilities, has been criticized (see, e.g., Alvares et al., 2020). In the context of this interview, this expression, intentionally placed in quotation marks, is used to refer to study participants who were unable to attend public school and perform most tasks without assistance compared with the level of functioning that would have been expected given their chronological age.

Thanks to Dr. Duan for taking the time to speak with us. Make sure to attend her Keynote Lecture at OHBM 2023!

A Conversation with Takafumi Minamimoto (OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series Pt. 6)

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 22:39:12 GMT

Elisa Guma and Kevin Sitek

Using a variety of methods to map circuits in the primate brain

Takafumi Minamimoto is team leader of the Neural Systems and Circuits Research Group and deputy director of the Department of Functional Brain Imaging at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology in Chiba, Japan. His research focuses on the interaction between motivation, emotion, and memory in the brain of non-human primates.

To address these questions, Dr. Minamimoto uses a range of methods including neuroimaging with functional MRI and PET as well as chemogenetic techniques such as Designer Receptors Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs), which are a class of proteins that allow scientists to control neural activity in awake, freely moving animals.

In this interview, Elisa Guma and Kevin Sitek talked with Dr. Minamimoto about his research program, the path he took to get there, and what we can expect from his 2023 Keynote address.

Read on to learn more!

Elisa Guma (EG): Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Minamimoto. To get the audience familiar with your work, would you mind giving us a little bit of background about yourself and telling us how you got into science and the current research that you're doing?

Takafumi Minamimoto (TM): My work uses non-human primates and macaques as a model for humans. I first started by doing monkey neurophysiology, putting electrodes in their brains and recording neural signals. During my postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) I became interested in using non-invasive imaging technology, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and MRI, to study the brain. Next, I wanted to combine these imaging techniques with genetic or neuronal modifications using technologies like optogenetics and chemogenetics. These methods were well established in small animals like rodents, but not in non-human primates due to technical limitations.

Using these chemogenetic approaches in non-human primates is technically challenging. We tried to streamline the process by using PET imaging to visualize the expression of our chemogenetic receptors, rather than having to perform invasive, costly, and time consuming histology. This allows us to combine this technology with other neuroimaging techniques like functional MRI, which allows us to map the neural circuit and also manipulate those circuits.

EG: That's quite an impressive range of techniques and skills that you've acquired over the years going from in vivo electrophysiology, all the way up to PET imaging and back. You're covering multiple scales of investigation of how the brain works. How do you think about integrating these techniques to try to understand brain anatomy and function? Do you have some ideas about how they work together?

TM: A major goal of mine is to understand brain wide function using nonhuman primates as a model as the complexity and size of the brain is more similar to the human brain than other small animals. This can help us translate information from the rodent to the human as well.

Kevin Sitek (KS): That's really incredible to be able to think on all of these scales at the same time, and choose the best methods for any particular question. Can you maybe give us a sneak peek of what you're going to be presenting at the OHBM annual meeting? Is it going to be more methodologically focused? Or are you going to focus on a few specific circuits?

TM: I'm going to talk about the chemogenetic technology, DREADDs, that we recently developed in the non-human primate. [DREADD receptors can be introduced into specific brain regions through a range of gene transfer strategies, giving researchers a unique ability to manipulate certain brain circuits or cell populations and observe their effects on freely behaving animals.] I’ll cover what it is, how this works, and some of the challenges we faced when applying this specifically to non-human primates. I’ll provide some examples of how we have successfully applied this technology to manipulate specific circuits or specific cell types in the non-human primate brain to modulate higher brain function. I will also discuss the greater clinical applications of this technology.

Finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about the future of data collection, how we use this technology to understand human brain function and functional connectivity. If we manipulate the nonhuman primate functional connectivity with chemogenetics, we can see how it affects behavior.

KS: That's really exciting. I think that's going to be really well appreciated and inspiring for the members of our organization for human brain mapping. Looking beyond this next meeting, now that you have these good set of methodologies for investigating specific circuits, where do you see your research going over the next five or 10 years?

TM: I have several directions going on. One direction is to advance this chemogenetic technology further. I would like to be able to modify specific neural or cell type circuitry, such as dopamine or serotonin to understand how changing the function of these neurotransmitter systems and their circuits affects brain function. Additionally, I’d like to understand the biology underlying functional connectivity of the brains, such as the default mode network. In my earlier work I focused on electrophysiological recording where I set up experiments to understand how stimulation of one region affected another region. These measure faster reactions in the brain and are easier to analyze and correlate with the environment. Now, however, I’m more interested in understanding how small changes in mood, for example, affect brain function.

EG: That sounds like a very important question to be tackling. How do you think you would look at changes in mood using non-human primates, or would you look at humans? Do you have some ideas as to how to unpack this question?

TM: This is technically challenging. It’s difficult to ask a monkey, “How do you feel?”. Instead, I have been working on understanding motivated behaviours in this species because often, if we are motivated to perform a task, we are feeling good. One way to do this is to record animal behavior and perform video based behavioral analysis to measure body movement and facial expression, using behavioral tracking tools such as DeepLabCut. This can help us infer aspects of mood or internal state in non-human primates.

EG: It sounds like the models you have are really useful for being able to dissect circuits and identify mechanisms with closer relevance to humans, given how we're more evolutionarily similar to nonhuman primates than other common animal models like mice or rats.

I am curious to hear a little bit more about how you generate these models of depression in the non-human primates. Do you have other models of psychiatric conditions, too?

TM: We have tried to manipulate the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems in the nonhuman primate given their relevance to human neuropsychiatric conditions. However, they are not “complete” models. We have also used a model of hypothyroidism in the macaque monkeys. We have previously shown that animals with hypothyroidism have low motivation, symptoms of fatigue and depression, as well as decreased dopamine release in certain brain areas. Studying these animals could help us understand certain behaviors associated with decreased motivation as well as brain function using MRI and PET imaging.

EG: I also wanted to circle back to chemogenetics, which is a huge innovation in the nonhuman primate. I'm curious to know what some of the bigger challenges were that you faced in getting it to work.

TM: Thank you. The first major technical difficulty was in determining whether the injected virus was targeting the correct brain region or neural population. This technique had been developed in rodents, so there were no viruses that worked for non-human primates. We had to develop these specific viruses. Determining whether these viruses worked was a painstaking process involving injecting a monkey, waiting for the virus to express, then removing the brain, cutting tissue, and staining it to see if the virus was transfected. This process can take several months or years, and it can be very costly. To avoid this, we thought of using PET imaging to help us determine if the viral vector actually worked in vivo, rather than having to perform all that postmortem validation. So, we developed a PET ligand, [11C]CLZ, that would specifically bind to the receptors we were transfecting with our viral vectors and allow us to visualize the DREADD expression in vivo. This allowed us to examine the spatial extent of the receptors, which are critical to optimizing the technology.

In addition, we also faced several obstacles with the dose of clozapine-N-oxide (CNO), which is the molecule required to activate the DREADDs. We had to administer very large doses of CNO since the monkeys have a much larger body mass than rodents. This is very costly.

Finally, we had to wait a long time for the DREADD receptors to activate after we injected them. So, we developed a new DREADD agonist named Deschloroclozapine (DCC) which gets into the brain very easily and can be activated with high specificity. These innovations have improved the efficiency of DREADD technology in nonhuman primates.

With these technological advances in place, we can now try to manipulate brain circuits, or one brain area by injecting the viral vector and visualizing the effects.

EG: It sounds like you had some significant challenges that you overcame with some very creative methods. I think that's a good lesson for early career scientists in thinking how to innovate around potential roadblocks. I was just wondering if there's anything else that you wish you knew as an early career scientist or some piece of advice that you have for younger scientists about how they can succeed in this field?

TM: I always tried to be a researcher who was working on something different from what others were doing. Being unique is very important. At the time when I was starting my training there were many people doing non-human primate research, especially in Japan, so I was worried about how to move my career forward. I decided to chase the new technologies, which is very challenging and can be a bit of a gamble. But it can also work out, and it is sometimes both important and essential. I was so lucky to have many collaborators, friends, and good teammates.

KS: Yeah, that's great advice, finding the right team and finding the right questions so that you can tackle a unique problem.

EG: I was just thinking about your comments on trying to make yourself unique and identifying or answering questions in ways that people haven't thought of. Do you think that there were particular pivotal moments along your career that really brought you towards the unique path that you're currently on, or was it more of a gradual build over time?

TM: Good question. When I started my career as a university student, I was conducting neurophysiology experiments. I trained monkeys every day—stuck electrodes in their brains and tried to pharmacologically manipulate their neural activity to understand brain circuitry. I also used immunohistochemistry and histology. Experiencing several techniques as a PhD student opened my mind to try using other techniques. Then when I joined Barry Richmond at NIH as a postdoc, I worked on projects using completely different methods and experienced a different culture of doing things. It is common for each researcher to be training one monkey at a time, so one researcher might train one monkey for several years. But we used three set-ups and tested more than 10 monkeys per day. Compared to human neuroimaging or rodent research, nonhuman primate studies may take a long time, but we can still design experiments to collect lots of data. This opened my mind in a different way as well.

EG: It sounds like you are one to try to solve a problem creatively rather than get stuck on it. I think another good piece of advice that you shared at the beginning of this comment was that you got to try lots of different techniques, and often that can open your mind to applying them in a novel way or in a novel species and whatnot. I think there's lots of good advice for junior trainees and what you're sharing with us today.

KS: One issue that I became aware of through a blog post by one of our OHBM members, Hiromasa Takemura, was the lack of visibility of Japanese neuroscientists and OHBM. Despite the strong research culture in Japanese institutions, Japanese members are underrepresented in organizations like OHBM, and those members may prefer to present posters over oral presentations. This is not only very unfortunate for those members but also for the larger community. I think there's a lot that we could gain from richer interactions between members across the globe. As an international organization, this is very important to us. I’m wondering if you have any ideas about how we can better develop cross-linguistic presentations or conferences in a better way?

TM: Yeah, that's a good question. I think one way to reach more Japanese researchers could be to better advertise to Japanese neuroimagers and neuroscientists specifically. For example, updates could be posted on Japanese neuroscience websites. Another way could be to organize a joint symposium with Japanese researchers either in Japanese or at international conferences. We Japanese people tend to not go abroad as much as other groups. Perhaps providing more information in Japanese could be a good way to reach more researchers.

EG: Maybe to close out our time together today, I was wondering if there was anything else you'd want to share with the OHBM audience about your science or your path or anything you'd like to leave this with.

TM: I think that with all of the neuroimaging technologies available to us, it can be overwhelming for early career researchers. Even one paper may include lots of different technologies that are difficult to understand without lots of background knowledge. Even if it may be challenging, do not worry or get discouraged by the situation. Try to understand one method really well. This can give you good intuition about how the brain works in one way, which you can then expand upon by using different methods later on. So, here, for example, with human brain mapping we mainly use neuroimaging as a core technology to understand the brain. But there are a number of technologies that can help us understand the amazing human brain and complex neural circuits and function. So please, open your mind to other methods. I started working in neurophysiology, so my basic idea of how the brain works comes from the neuronal spike. Only afterward did I start using neuroimaging, but I can always try to connect the dots between neurophysiology and neuroimaging and keep updating my intuition. Research is very fun, so enjoy what you are doing! If you don't enjoy it, then you're doing the wrong thing.

EG: I think the advice you share—about not being overwhelmed or scared by not knowing something—is also very important to hear as scientists because we're often trying things for the first time that no one else has done and will probably fail several times before we figure something out. So thank you for sharing that advice with everyone.

A Conversation with Aviv Mezer (OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series Pt. 5)

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 20:26:17 GMT

Alfie Wearn and Faruk Gulban

Exploring quantitative MRI and 'in vivo histology'

Dr. Aviv Mezer is an Associate Professor at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Dr. Mezer’s lab is focused on mapping human brain structures during normal development and aging. In addition, it is focused on developing new approaches to characterize the structural changes associated with neurological disorders. Mezer’s main research tool is in vivo quantitative magnetic resonance imaging – qMRI. The Mezer lab is developing tools to biophysically explain the brain’s MRI signals at different levels and resolutions: from molecular local sources through cellular organization to the mapping of networks across the entire brain.

In this interview, we discuss the field of qMRI more broadly, touching upon the present and future interpretations of "in vivo histology." We also discuss Dr Mezer’s approach to mentorship, as well as the skills that would benefit future researchers in this field.
At OHBM 2023, Dr. Mezer will show us how combining multiple quantitative MRI measures can provide additional biological information about tissue composition and brain health.

You can find the video interview here and listen to the audio-only podcast version here (or on your podcast app of choice).