OHBM Neurosalience episode 6: The Opportunities and Challenges of Physiologic fMRI

By Peter Bandettini & the OHBM Neurosalience production team

Drs Jean Chen (left) and Molly Bright.

This week’s podcast is centered on physiologic fMRI. Generally, when people think of fMRI, they think of a way to map neuronal function, however there is so much information about neurovascular physiology in the signal. Many researchers who use fMRI may not realize all of the potentially untapped information—and confounds!—in the fMRI time series. Dr Jean Chen and Dr Molly Bright each run research groups that focus on this information in complementary ways. Both use physiologic manipulations and an array of acquisition methods to probe and characterize details of the hemodynamic response, though their two research programs focus on different aspects of the haemodynamic response function. In this podcast, they highlight the importance of physiologic fMRI for the field. They also consider the challenges facing women in male-dominated research fields and how the life of women scientists might be improved. 

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​Guests: 
Jean Chen PhD. Dr. Chen received her MSc (2004) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Calgary, and her PhD (2009) in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University. She completed her postdoctoral work on multimodal MRI of brain aging at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and Harvard Medical School (2011), then joined The University of Toronto Medical Biophysics Program as faculty. She is a Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Aging. 

Molly Bright PhD. Following a B.S. in physics from MIT in 2006, Molly received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2011 as part of a collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, working with Peter Jezzard at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB) and Jeff Duyn in the Advanced MRI group of NINDS.  She completed postdoctoral training at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC). She then moved to Nottingham as an independent Anne McLaren Fellow, to develop ultra-high-field MR imaging methods for studying cerebral physiology in neurological diseases at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre.
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The Neurosalience production team consists of Rachael Stickland, Kevin Sitek, Katie Moran and Anastasia Brovkin​