Meet the blog Team

COMCOM LEADERSHIP

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Elizabeth DuPre is the Lead Editor for the OHBM blog (2021-). Elizabeth is a doctoral student at the Montreal Neurological Institute where her research focuses on using naturalistic stimuli to improve intersubject functional mapping. Through this work she is actively involved in developing open source, community-based solutions for ongoing technical challenges including data standards and analysis. To support these efforts she is actively involved in open science initiatives, most recently having served as secretary for the OHBM open science special interest group. You can contact her on twitter @emdupre_. ​
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Ilona Lipp is the current ComCom chair (2021-). Ilona is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig (Germany), where she investigates cortical microstructure using high resolution quantitative MRI and histology. During her previous projects at the University of Graz (Austria) and at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC) in Wales, where she completed her PhD, Ilona specialised in the combination of various MRI modalities to study individual differences in healthy and clinical populations. Having a strong interest in analysis methods and the “constant urge to understand everything”, her aspiration in science is to identify reliable and biologically specific in vivo biomarkers, and to bridge the gap between MRI methods development and neuroscientific applications. Outside of work, Ilona is a dedicated basketball player, board gamer and baker.
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Nils Muhlert, past chair of ComCom (2020-2021), is a lecturer in the Division of Neuroscience & Experimental Psychology at the University of Manchester, UK. He previously worked as a postdoc at the UCL Institute of Neurology in London, and as a Wellcome Trust and Welsh Government Health Research fellow in CUBRIC, Cardiff University. He's interested in the brain structure correlates of memory and impulsivity, and how these forms of cognition are affected in clinical disorders, such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. Nils has been awarded the Charles Symonds award from the Association of British Neurologists (2011), twice awarded the Alwyn Lishman award from the British Neuropsychiatry Association (2009 and 2016), is an editorial board member for Neurology and Frontiers in Neurology, and was the lead editor of the OHBM blog from 2016 until 2019.  ​When he's not working, Nils is mainly tidying-up after his son.

COMCOM MEMBERS

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Rachael Stickland completed her PhD at Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Center (CUBRIC) in 2018 and is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University in the Bright Lab. Rachael has experience using multi-modal neuroimaging to non-invasively study neurovascular coupling, cerebrovascular reactivity and oxygen metabolism in humans. She asks her research participants to perform breathing tasks or breathe in different gas mixtures during functional MRI, to help provide interpretable and quantifiable measures of brain function that are more useful for clinical applications. She joined the OHBM blog team in early 2020. Find her on Twitter @DrStick_Ray.
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Kevin Sitek is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders investigating subcortical connectivity and function underlying human speech communication. He received his PhD in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology from Harvard University, where he studied the anatomy and connectivity of the human subcortical auditory system at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Kevin is part of the podcast team and has previously worked with OHBM’s Student–Postdoc Special Interest Group and the 2021 OHBM Technology Task Force.
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Nabin Koirala is a postdoctoral researcher at Haskins Laboratories whose research focuses on understanding the structural and network level alterations in the brain that occur during various psychological and neurological disorders. Currently, in addition to the continuation and elaboration of previous works in movement disorders, he is working on a large multicenter neuroimaging dataset focused on neuropsychological disorders on developing various techniques to analyze, optimize and predict genetics and behavioral outcomes. Before doing neuroscience, he worked as an Engineer in Nepal before moving to Germany. You can find more about him and his research at https://nabinkoirala.com/

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Eduardo Garza-Villarreal is an Assistant Professor at the National MRI Laboratory and the Institute of Neurobiology, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Querétaro, Mexico. His lines of research are: 1) frontostriatal system in substance use and addiction, and neuropsychiatric disorders, 2) identification of neuroimaging biomarkers in humans and animal models, 3) action mechanisms and possible uses of neuromodulation methods. Eduardo trained as a medical doctor at the UANL in Monterrey, Mexico. He then completed his PhD in Neuroscience and a post-doc at the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus, Denmark. He joined the OHBM ComCom in 2020. You can find more about his lab at https://psilantrolab.xyz/, or follow him on Twitter @egarzav @labgarza.
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Peter Bandettini is the Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods and Director of the Functional MRI Facility in the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD. He has been engaged in both functional MRI methods development research and OHBM leadership since their respective beginnings. For OHBM, he has served as President in 2006, Secretary in 2000, Program Chair in 2002 and 2006 and served on the program committee for 14 annual meetings. He also chaired the education committee in 2000 and 2001 and helped establish the current structure of meeting-related education courses. Currently he is chair of the of OHBM Scientific Advisory Board, Standards Committee, and Aperture Neuro Oversight Committee. He is also the host of the OHBM Neurosalience podcast. In 2020, he was awarded the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Gold Medal. His group’s research is focused on developing ultra-high resolution and high field fMRI for mapping cortical layer activation, and time series analysis approaches, acquisition strategies, and paradigm designs for deriving maps that allow individual subject assessment, and ultimately, provide insight into brain organization and clinical utility.
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Yana Dimech completed her MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Malta in 2020 under the supervision of Dr Claude Bajada. Her research is involved in investigating sex-differences in white matter tracts related to moral cognition. Yana has experience performing meta-analysis, tractography and fixel-based analysis. She has also worked in the mental health field with  older people with dementia and adults with traumatic brain injuries (TBI).
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Xiao Chen is a postdoctoral fellow at R-fMRI Lab in the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He completed his PhD training in cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Psychology. He systematically evaluated the reproducibility of resting-state fMRI and gave recommendations on the strategy of multiple comparison correction. He also developed a “rumination state” paradigm to induce participants into a rumination state in the MRI scanner and investigated the network mechanism underlying rumination. He is now working on fMRI data from patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and SEEG data from patients with epilepsy in the rumination state.

CONTRIBUTORS (FUTURE AND PAST MEMBERS)

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​AmanPreet Badhwar holds a PhD from McGill University, where she integrated brain imaging, quantitative proteomics and measures of neurovascular coupling to study the interaction of neuronal and neurovascular damage in Alzheimer’s disease models, and the impact of therapeutics on these two components.  She was awarded the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Age+ Prize, which recognizes excellence in research on aging, for one of the publications arising from her thesis work. Aman is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM), University of Montreal, where her research focus is to determine how aspects of brain connectivity could be developed as biomarkers of progression in Alzheimer’s disease. Her scientific vision is to cut across intellectual silos and integrate multiple streams of data to answer big questions in Alzheimer’s disease research. She holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alzheimer Society of Canada, and is a member of the Biomarker team of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging. Aman is the current Chair of the OHBM BrainArt SIG. She is also engaged in public outreach through her artistic works, where the topics of brain organization, plasticity, and memory are recurrent. She has held a number of expositions of her work integrating science and art, and has been a winner in The Neuro Bureau Brain-Art Competition in multiple years.
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​Nikola Stikov, is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute, and co-director of NeuroPoly, the Neuroimaging Research Laboratory at École Polytechnique (University of Montreal). His research runs the gamut of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging, from basic issues of standardization and accuracy, to biophysical modeling, microstructural imaging and clinical applications. Nikola is the founder of MRBalkan.org and has organized several international conferences under the auspices of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM). In 2014 he was elected Junior Fellow of the ISMRM, and in 2015 he joined the editorial board of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, spearheading its Highlights initiative. Nikola was the Blog Team's first Captain (2015-16).
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ABOUT OHBM
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​Jean Chen is the director of the Neuroimaging Research Lab at the Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Aging, and is Assistant Professor in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. She obtained her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University (Montreal Neurological Institute), where she investigated the biophysical origins of the blood-oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, where she investigated the cerebrovascular correlates of brain aging using perfusion and diffusion MRI. Her current research program mainly focuses on determining the neurovascular and electrophysiological basis of resting fMRI measures. Her research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. Jean is on the editorial boards for Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism and Frontiers in Neuroscience. Through her work, she is committed to developing neuroimaging measures into sensitive markers to aid the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. She is also committed to creating nurturing training environments that will prepare new researchers to become prolific independent scientists. 
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David Mehler is a final year MD/PhD student at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC) in Wales (UK) and the University of Muenster medical school (Germany). His research focuses on translational applications for rehabilitation. For his MD he has investigated motor learning principles in humans using a robot at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His PhD research in Cardiff has focused on clinical applications of fMRI neurofeedback training for depression and motor rehabilitation in stroke and Parkinson’s disease. David is Executive Board member of the European MD/PhD Association (EMPA). He is committed to methods training for ECRs and open science, two passions that sometimes shine through his blog posts, as well as topics around translational applications for neuroimaging. ​On twitter he is @neuroccino
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Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, and Director of the Educational Neuroimaging Center (ENIC) at Technion, the Israeli institute of technology in Haifa, Israel. She is also an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and the Scientific Director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, USA. Tzipi trained in Biology and Neurobiology.  After completing her PhD, she conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Haifa using behavioral and EEG measures following intervention programs for children with learning disabilities, as well as studies aimed at developing objective measures to assess the effectiveness of interventions for reading difficulties. Tzipi has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship using fMRI, DTI, and EEG to understand the mechanisms underlying reading disabilities in children, in order to develop more effective reading interventions. Now, Tzipi is an Alon scholar, and PI on several Pediatric Neuroimaging Research projects, funded by the NIH and Promobilia foundation, to help advance our understanding of the neural circuits supporting learning and language in the developing brain.
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Claude Bajada is a lecturer, currently building up a research team at the University of Malta. His work covers three main themes:  1. Establishing a clear, consistent description of the white matter anatomy of the human brain. 2. Investigating the historical insights on white matter anatomy. 3. Using novel computational approaches to explore the human connectome. Claude graduated from medical school in 2010 and had two years experience as a practicing medical doctor. He then completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL, London. He subsequently carried out his PhD at The University of Manchester. His PhD project involved developing mathematical and neuroimaging approaches to understand the connective anatomy of the brain’s temporal lobe.
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Ekaterina Dobryakova, PhD, is a Research Scientist at Kessler Foundation. Ekaterina’s training is in cognitive neuroscience. During her graduate work, she focused on examining the functioning of the basal ganglia during learning in the context of delay and effort. Her current work focuses on examining cognitive mechanisms associated with  basal ganglia functioning in individuals with brain injury and multiple sclerosis, such as learning, motivation, depression, and fatigue. The overarching goal of Ekaterina’s research is improvement of rehabilitation strategies. Ekaterina is also a cat person. She has two Siberian cats and is an occasional cat sitter for her family members. 
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Roselyne Chauvin is a post doctoral researcher at the Washington University in St Louis (US). Roselyne trained in health information technology at Polytech'Grenoble and cognitive science at the Cogmaster, Paris, in France. She completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Jan Buitelaar and Prof. Christian Beckmann, during which time she conducted research on human development, including developmental disorders such as ADHD and Autism, and developed new methods for studying the human connectome. In order to bridge the gap between art and science communication, Roselyne performs live-sketching at conferences. In 2013, Roselyne founded Cogni'Junior, a non-profit organization that provides tools designed to educate children about cognitive science. Cogni'Junior distributes all its tools via open access. Furthermore, Roselyne has participated in creating two MOOCs and has educated teachers on the application of cognitive science to education.