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

12/19/2023

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Author: ​Alexander Albury

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

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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.

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

12/19/2023

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

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

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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!

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Education in Neuroimaging Award - Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda

12/6/2023

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Elisa Guma & The Communications Committee

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

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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. ​

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Early Career Investigator Award: Dr. Catie Chang

12/5/2023

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Elisa Guma & the communications committee

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

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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!

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