Network Neuroscience for the Clinic: OHBM2022 Keynote Interview with Dr. Juan (Helen) Zhou

Alexander Holmes

PhD Candidate at the Neural Systems and Behaviour Lab, Monash University, Australia

Dr. Juan (Helen) Zhou is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the Multimodal Neuroimaging in Neuropsychiatric Disorders Laboratory in the Centre for Sleep and Cognition, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). She also holds a joint appointment with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS,  and she currently serves as the Deputy Director for the Centre for Translational Magnetic Resonance Research at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.  She recently finished her term as Council Secretary and a member of the Program Committee of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

 Across these roles, Dr Zhou’s research focuses on the network-based vulnerability hypothesis in disease. Specifically, her lab studies the neural bases of human cognitive functions and the associated vulnerability patterns in ageing and neuropsychiatric disorders using multimodal neuroimaging methods, psychophysical techniques, and machine learning approaches.

​Dr. Zhou presented a keynote address at OHBM 2022 in Glasgow—read on to learn about her research, career path, and hopes for the future of neuroimaging! 
​
 Alexander Holmes (AH): Welcome Dr. Zhou, thank you so much for joining us here—it is an honour to have you with us. Can you first tell us about your pathway into science and how you got to where you are now?​

Helen Zhou (HZ): Ah, do you want the short answer or the long answer? When I was doing my undergraduate studies at the School of Computer Science and Engineering in Singapore, I was a part of this accelerated Masters program. During our final year, we needed to do some research, which was where I became interested in algorithms, neural networks, and image processing. When I tried these machine learning projects, it was my first hands-on experience using these algorithms to solve real problems. So, there were many ups and downs (Laughs).

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