OHBM Neurosalience

Today our guest is Dr. Angie Laird, who trained as an imaging physicist, but has evolved into a cognitive neuroscientist and a true pioneer in meta-analysis of fMRI data. Dr. Laird has spent the bulk of her career developing novel data analysis algorithms, neuroscience informatics tools, and neuroimaging ontologies to yield analytic strategies for improving investigations into functional brain networks of healthy individuals as well as in populations with psychiatric and neurologic diseases and disorders. Early on she has seen the untapped value in meta-analysis, and has fostered growth in this fundamentally important area in functional brain imaging. Dr. Laird received her B.S. in Physics from Florida State University in 1998, and her Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002. She was a faculty member at the Research Imaging Institute of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio from 2004-2012, and currently she is Professor and Director for Imaging Science at Florida International University in Miami. Along with her development of meta-analysis tools and her own research, she plays a central role in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) consortium which is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. This was a great conversation that spanned the early culture of fMRI research, early efforts towards data sharing, to the current practices today where data sharing and analyzing data across studies and from large shared datasets is becoming the norm. We also spent time talking about the origin, logistics, and impact of the ABCD project. We hope you enjoy it! Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Xuqian Michelle Li

In this special kickoff to the new season of Neurosalience, we turn the tables as Peter Bandettini, our host, joins us as the guest! We dive into highlights from last season and explore exciting plans for the episodes ahead. In addition, we had an insightful conversation on resting-state fMRI, computational modeling of the brain, and the importance of deep sampling in individuals. Plus, we discuss some news on the shifting landscape of scientific publishing.  We hope that you enjoy the new season of Neurosalience. Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban

In this final episode of Neurosalience Season 4, Peter Bandettini hosts Janaina Mourao-Miranda, Simon Eickhoff, Sepideh Sadaghiani, Thomas Yeo, Michael Milham. The discussion was centered around:  Clinical relevance of fMRI today. Future directions of neuroimaging, promises to get excited about, and overpromises that need to be considered cautiously. How can fMRI help to understand the brain from a general point of view. This is the final episode of Neurosalience Season 4! See you in the next season :) Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban

In this episode, Peter Bandettini hosts Jon Polimeni, Renzo Huber, Nikola Stikov, Luca Vizioli, and Essa Yacoub. They talk about the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) conferences where they have attended both over many years. The conversation revolves around what each meeting offers, how they differ, how we might increase cross-talk, and why that would be a good thing. They also highlight some of the exciting work and developments gleaned from ISMRM that might not appear at OHBM. Enjoy!  Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban

Here Kevin Sitek (the Chair of the OHBM Communications Committee and a Research Assistant Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University), Sofie Valk (Research group leader and Scientific representative at Otto Hahn Group Cognitive Neurogenetics), and Hae-Jeong Park (Professor of Nuclear Medicine, Yonsei University College of Medicine, South Korea) discuss what to expect from OHBM 2024, including the education sessions, Oral Sessions, Symposia, Keynotes, and Talairach Lecture as well as discussion of the many informal round table sessions offered, the social events, the outreach, the SIGs, and the Communication Committee. They also discussed a bit about Korea and how the meeting came to be here this year. A great discussion with lots of information! See you there June 23 to June 27!  Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Xuqian Michelle Li

Dr. Vince Calhoun is the founding director of the tri-institutional center for translational research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) which is a consortium formed by Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, and Emory University. In this part 2 of Peter and Vince’s discussion, they dive further into addressing the challenges that fMRI and other modalities face in finding useful information about psychiatric disorders that can be used clinically. They talk about what neuroimaging has taught us about schizophrenia, as well as the goals and challenges of establishing clinical relevance. They also talk a bit about the importance of a data driven approach to development of processing methods, as well as variability in fMRI data, and the challenges and opportunities that big data sets offer, the promise of data fusion, and multivariate modeling. Lastly, they also discuss his latest work in deep learning and what it offers, and spend quite a bit of time discussing data driven approaches vs model driven approaches. This discussion was an outstanding perspective builder. We hope that you enjoy it! Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Xuqian Michelle Li

Today our guest is Dr. Vince Calhoun, who's also a longtime colleague and friend of Peter Bandettini. Vince is the founding director of the tri-institutional center for translational research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) which is a consortium formed by Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, and Emory University. Vince Received his BS in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas, in 1991, two masters degrees in Biomedical engineering and information systems from Johns Hopkins in 1993, and 1996, and his Ph.D. in EE from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2002. After four years at Yale University, he became President of the Mind Research Network and Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico, before he moved to Atlanta for his present position several years ago. Vince's focus over the years could be summarized as using fMRI and other neuroimaging methods while developing processing methods to extract every possible useful bit of information. He's been prodigiously engaged and productive for over 20 years advancing multi-modal brain imaging, data fusion, and machine learning. His work has inspired new ways of looking at the data. In this discussion, Peter and Vince talk about work, professional journey from the east coast to New Mexico and now to Atlanta, as well as his successful battle with cancer in about 2010. We hope you enjoy this episode. Episode producers: Xuqian Michelle Li Johanna Bayer Omer Faruk Gulban

Today we zoom in on Vancouver British Columbia to interview Dr. Todd Woodward, who is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and director of the UBC Brain Dynamics Laboratory. He's also the Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Schizophrenia Laboratory at BC Mental Health and Addictions Research Institute in Vancouver. Dr. Woodward received his Ph.D. in Experimental Neuropsychology at the University of Victoria in 1999, and performed his post-doc in the department of psychology at UBC. Since 2003 he's moved up from research scientist to professor - all at the University of British Columbia.  He's been working at the interface of processing methods and well-crafted experimental designs to probe the networks that may be disrupted in schizophrenia and other disorders. He and his team developed almost two decades ago a unique and elegant method known as constrained principal component analysis ( or CPCA), which he has been applying successfully with many different tasks. He's also deeply interested in novel non-pharmaceutical interventions that help augment schizophrenia treatment - having developed a program called metacognitive training (MCT), which may allow those with schizophrenia to be able to step back and begin to assess their own beliefs. This was such a wide ranging conversation which delved into the nuts and bolts of CPCA as well as the potential future role that neuroimaging can play in better understanding and ultimately treating schizophrenia. We hope you enjoy this episode. Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Xuqian Michelle Li

In this episode, our guest is Rotem Botvinik-Nezer, a postdoc at Dartmouth University, working with Dr. Tor Wager in his  Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab. In 2020, Dr. Botvinik-Nezer was first author of an influential paper published in Nature, titled Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams, where the results were compared  from 70 independent teams analyzing a single data set having 9 hypotheses. This paper made it clear that there are many points of variability in data analysis pipelines, and provided further incentives for sharing data and code to grow consensus and replicability. While the popular press suggested that this paper was yet another hit to fMRI, we discuss how even papers that critique the results of this seminal paper ultimately converge in agreement with the overall message of systematic transparency. Dr. Botvinik-Nezer also has a strong interest in how our brains influence our perception of pain, having just published a recent paper showing evidence that regions associated with painful stimuli remain active even when subjects experience less pain while having the belief that a placebo is effective. In this conversation, Peter and Rotem delve into all these topics and more, but spend  the bulk of the discussion on the interplay between choices in analyses, such as determining a statistical threshold, and  variability in results. We also discuss incentives for users to share data and code and possible ways to create a more solid scaffolding for best practices.  Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Xuqian Michelle Li

Dr. Daniele Marinazzo is a full professor in the department of data analysis at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. For over a decade he has been showing us what further information and insight we may extract from brain imaging data - from EEG and MEG to fMRI. He is technically a statistical physicist, but in reality, he is a network neuroscientist and data modeler who is constantly pushing the envelope. In this podcast he discusses some recent papers that go into how we might be able to improve the impact and relevance of new findings and models through careful benchmarking and well considered experimental design. He talks about his desire to move from correlation to causation in functional connectivity studies, he discusses granger causality, as well as moving from pairwise correlation to multivariate correlation. Furthermore, he delves into the limits of hemodynamics - limits that may be pushed back to a degree, as suggested by his compelling work showing that hemodynamic response function, which varies over space, may be estimated on a voxel-wise basis using resting state data alone. His work in estimating and mapping the Excitation/Inhibition ratio in the brain by using gamma frequency coherence as a signature was also discussed. This has potentially profound clinical and research applications. Lastly, his collaborative work with the European Human Brain Project towards the creation of the useful website, called ebrains (https://www.ebrains.eu), was discussed, which serves as a repository and tool for exploring shared data and code, as well as providing a user-friendly encapsulation of the project's collective effort. It is an all-around fun, eye-opening discussion featuring an outstanding scientist who is not only deep in the trenches of network modelling, but also a strong proponent of open science and constant engagement across disciplines. Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Alfie Wearn Stephania Assimopoulos Referenced Papers: Mika Rubinov. Circular and unified analysis in network neuroscience. eLife. 2023; 12:e79559. Doi: 10.7554/eLife.79559   Reid AT, et al. Advancing functional connectivity research from association to causation. Nat Neurosci. 2019 Nov;22(11):1751-1760. Doi: 10.1038/s41593-019-0510-4.   Valdes-Sosa PA et al. Effective connectivity: Influence, causality and biophysical modelling. Neuroimage. 2009; 58(2): 339-361. Doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.03.058.   Wu GR, et al. A blind deconvolution approach to recover effective connectivity brain networks from resting state fMRI data. Medical Image Analysis. 2013; 17(3):365-374. Doi: 10.1016/j.media.2013.01.003.

If you are interested in working with Nathan, he is currently recruiting for a postdoc! Send your CV to lbc.spreng@gmail.com Today our guest is Nathan Spreng. Dr. Spreng is the James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery and Director of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University. As an undergraduate, Dr. Spreng was initially interested in pursuing a major in poetry until he took a psychology class that sparked his interest in the brain. He received Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Toronto in Brian Levine's lab, and post docs with Cheryl Grady at the University of Toronto and Dan Schacter at Harvard. After about 5 years as an assistant professor at Cornell University, he moved to McGill University. Throughout his career Dr. Spreng has been using fMRI to reveal subtle yet repeatable large-scale brain networks as they relate attention, memory, cognitive control, and social cognition. He has also helped to elucidate the central role that the default network plays in self-generated thought, and in how it dynamically interacts with multiple systems in the brain. In this episode Peter and Nathan have a far reaching conversation about his work and what it implies, covering his study of age dependence of resting state hippocampal-linked network ensembles, how to move from mapping networks to modeling and understanding mechanisms, the many possible clinical implications of his work, current understanding of Alzheimer's disease, our mutual appreciation for multi-echo EPI, his data release paper of a large multi-echo EPI and structural MRI data set, and much more. Enjoy listening! Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Omer Faruk Gulban

It is our great pleasure and deep honor to host Dr. Marsel Mesulam who is a giant in the field of Neurology and one of founders of OHBM. Dr. Mesulam is Chief of Behavioral Neurology and the Ruth Dunbar Davee Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Professor of Behavioral Neurology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.Dr. Mesulam received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1972, and in 1976 completed residencies at Boston City Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. After a 1 year postdoc at Harvard University he began his tenure in Chicago at Northwestern. Dr. Mesulam's work has been both prodigious and impactful over the years, as his almost 1000 papers have been cited over 140 thousand times. He has written the seminal book, Principles of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, and has produced many landmark papers - a few of which we'll discuss in the podcast. One paper that we consider a masterpiece was published in Brain in 1998 and titled From Sensation to Cognition. This can be considered as a required reading for everyone in the field of brain mapping as it lays out so concisely and eloquently, a breathtaking perspective of the structure and functional organization of the human brain. Dr. Mesulam's research is extremely broad and diverse, having impacted such areas as neural networks and functional imaging, Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), Cholinergic Pathways, Acetylcholinesterase Studies, Cognitive Psychology, Neurology, and Neuropsychiatry. He also developed, early in his career, a neuronal marker, Tetramethyl benzidine, that profoundly impacted research in this area. In this inspiring conversation, Peter and Marsel discuss his early career and what was important for his success, delve into research culture and the value of opportunistic research, and the value of having the freedom and resources to try many things and rapidly change directions that follow interesting leads. They also discuss some of the exciting early days of Neuroimaging and OHBM. Lastly, we go into some of his current research on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and the study of temporal pole disease as a window to temporal pole functional significance. We hope that you enjoy this conversation. Episode producers:Alfie WearnOmer Faruk Gulban

Dr. Rosenberg received her Ph.D. from the department of Psychology at Yale University, where she also carried out her post doc. In 2019, she started as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago and is a member of the Chicago Neuroscience Institute.  She has been pioneering the use of connectome-based predictive modeling to capture individual differences in the ability to sustain attention. Attention is fundamental to just about everything that we experience and do and how we navigate the world. It varies over time and each person has different abilities to maintain it. Monica has developed and used extensively a task known as gradCPT, an easy at first but hard to sustain, continuous attention task that allows moment to moment assessment of sustained attention. She has found two networks that characterize high attention vs lower attention, and these have been powerful for characterizing individuals ability to sustain attention. It's also been useful for characterizing differences in such attention-related skills such as reading comprehension.  She's been delving further into both fMRI methodology and the nuances of attention ever since. In this conversation we talk about her career development, the great environment at Yale, the development of her exciting and impactful  fMRI-based human attention research. We hope you enjoy the conversation! Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban

Today, we are excited to have Dr. Evan Gordon on the podcast. Evan is an assistant professor in the Neuroimaging Labs Research Center, based in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Since joining the group and joining forces with what is known as the "midnight scan club," he has gone on a scientific tear, publishing several highly influential papers that make use of the unique high-fidelity data sets, containing up to 11 hours of resting state or task-activated fMRI data for each subject. This powerful approach in fMRI is known as "deep sampling." His findings include insights into unique individual connectivity patterns,  the whole brain use of a novel parcellation approach using boundary maps, and most recently, discovery of effector-specific regions in motor cortex - a finding which is likely to replace in textbooks the classic Penfield maps of the homunculus.  This was a wonderful conversation where we explored the implementation, benefits, and potential of deep sampling of fMRI data! Evan is not only a creative and productive scientist, but a great conversationalist. We hope you enjoy it! Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Alfie Wearn

Today, our guest is Shella Keilholz. Dr. Keilholz received her Bachelor's in Physics from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1997, and her PhD in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia in 2004. She went on to a do a post-doc at NIH in Dr. Alan Koretsky's lab and in 2004 joined the department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University as a faculty member. She is now a full professor at Emory University and also closely affiliated with Georgia Tech. Since around 2008 she has been uncovering new spatial and temporal patterns in resting state fMRI. She was the first to identify spatial propagation of wave-like behavior in the resting state time series and in 2011 coined the term quasi-periodic patterns (QPP) to describe whole brain networks that dominate much of the resting state signal. Recently, she and others have described three such patterns that account for most of the variance. Here we not only talk about her career but also delve into how these quasi-periodic patterns mesh with the current landscape of diverse features of resting state fMRI that continue to be found. She has shown that these patterns may have a central driver and may relate to such things as vasomotion, global signal, arousal state, and attention. In general, there is much more information from basic neurophysiology to cognition that remains to be derived from resting state fMRI, and Shella is among those leading the effort. This was an incredibly stimulating and fun discission. We hope you enjoy it! Episode producers:Omer Faruk Gulban Jeff Mentch

Today, we’re excited to have Alex Huth on the podcast. Alex is one of the more creative and insightful people in the field of brain imaging today as he has been forging new ground using naturalistic stimuli and voxelwise models to create intricate maps of semantic features across large swaths of the brain. His seminal 2016 paper in Nature brought his approach to prominence: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17637 Here, Alex shares insights on the value of naturalistic stimuli on fMRI research and updates us on our current capabilities to decode brain activity. During this conversation Alex highlights an amazing tool to view semantic maps in the brain, which can be found here: https://gallantlab.org/viewer-huth-2016/ Alex received his bachelor’s in engineering and applied science from Cal Tec, where he was also working as an undergraduate researcher in Christoff Koch's lab. He continued on, receiving his Ph.D. in 2013 from University of California Berkeley, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, under the guidance of Dr.'s Christof Koch and Jack Gallant. He went on to do his post doc in the Gallant lab and finally moved to the University of Austin in 2017, where he is an assistant professor in computer science and neuroscience: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~huth/

Today, our guest is Dr. Andrew Jahn. Those of you learning MRI and fMRI analysis - which realistically, should be pretty much all of us - may already know about the amazing resources that he is prodigiously producing online. Starting with "Andy's Brain Blog" in 2012, expanding to videos (over 300 of them), and now his current project, "Andy's Brain Book", Dr. Jahn has been steadily creating a standard and a go-to resource for all of us to learn the nuts and bolts as well as concepts and nuances of processing our data. Dr. Jahn received his Bachelors in Psychology in 2008 from Carleton College, and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Indiana University in 2015. He did a postdoc at the Haskins Laboratories at Yale University, and is now a professor at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. There he has been given the freedom to expand his extremely valuable teaching resources. In this podcast we discuss how he got started in this, how perhaps failing to get a post-undergraduate position at the NIH started him down this path. We discuss the educational resources that he has been producing, and how he draws upon luminaries from Jaque Barzun to Dave Berry for inspiration. We also discuss the wider issue of education in neuroimaging - what can be taught and what cannot and have an open-ended conversation on the future of neuroimaging as well as some of his own planned future projects. This was a truly fun and enlightening discussion! We hope you enjoy it!  Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Omer Faruk Gulban Brain Art Artist: Laura Bundesen Title: Colors of hope

In this episode our guest is Dr. Russ Poldrack who has been so influential to the fields of fMRI, cognitive neuroscience, and brain imaging in general for the past 30+ years. Russ is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Open and Reproducible Science. Over the years, he has helped elevate how we do fMRI by creating resources and standards for sharing data and code. He is also working to advance the precision with which we think about task design and data interpretation through his Cognitive Atlas project, which is a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience.   Russ Poldrack received his Bachelors in Psychology from Baylor University in 1989, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign in 1995. After a postdoc at Stanford, he started, in 1999, as an assistant professor at Harvard University and Mass General Hospital, in 2002 he moved to UCLA, then in 2009, he became the director of the imaging research center at the University of Texas at Austin. Finally, in 2014 he was recruited to Stanford, where he has been ever since.  In this discussion, Peter and Russ look back into some of the paradigm shifts in fMRI best practices that Russ helped foster, as well as some of the big picture challenges that we face when using brain imaging, modeling, and precision task design to derive new insights into brain organization and mechanisms of computation. Here, Russ also weighs in on the prospects of fMRI for biomarker derivation and the exciting potential for single subject deep imaging.  Peter mentioned to Russ that this was one of the fastest hours he has experienced in quite some time as it was an engrossing discussion. Enjoy listening!  Episode producers Jeff Mentch Omer Faruk Gulban Brain Art Artist: Mia Coutinho Title: Represent, Connect, Empower

Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) 2023 live podcast session hosted by Alfie Wearn on site during the conference. In this episode, our guests Ana Luísa Pinho, Enrico Amico, Tim Laumann, and Emily Finn discuss mapping individual differences in the human brain. Enjoy listening! Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Omer Faruk Gulban Jeff Mentch

A brand new season of Neurosalience! This year production of podcast will be in the safe hands of Ömer Faruk Gülban.   Here, Faruk turns the microphone around onto our trusty host, Peter Bandettini, to talk about all Peter’s favorite moments of last season, some interesting updates about the ‘DIANA’ paper (discussed in Season 3 Episode 4), and future plans for your favorite brain mapping podcast.   Enjoy Season 4!