Featured Speakers

"Understanding Brain Cell Type Diversity"

Hongkui Zeng is Executive Vice President and Director of Allen Institute for Brain Science. Since joining the Allen Institute in 2006, she has led several efforts to develop and operate high-throughput pipelines to generate large-scale, open-access datasets and tools to accelerate neuroscience discovery. Her current research interests are in understanding neuronal diversity and connectivity in the mouse brain-wide circuits and how different cell types work together to process and transform information. Through her leadership of multiple scientific teams at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, she has built several research programs using transcriptomic, connectomic and multimodal approaches to characterize and classify the wide variety of cell types that constitute the mammalian brain, laying the foundation for unraveling the cell type basis of brain function. Her work has led to widely adopted community resources and standards, including transgenic mouse lines, Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, the Common Coordinate Framework (CCF) and the brain-wide transcriptomic cell type taxonomy. Zeng received her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Brandeis University, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock in fruit flies. As a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she studied the molecular and synaptic mechanisms underlying hippocampus-dependent plasticity and learning. She has received many honors, including the 2016 AWIS Award for Scientific Advancement and the 2018 Gill Transformative Investigator Award, and served on multiple committees and advisory boards, including the Society for Neuroscience Program Committee, the Advisory Board of Cell and Neuron, and the National Advisory Mental Health Council.

"Connectomic Deep Brain Stimulation"

Andreas received an MD from Freiburg University and a PhD from Charité Berlin. He is Associate Professor for Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of deep brain stimulation research within the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is further affiliated with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Charité Berlin.

His lab studies how focal neuromodulation impacts the human connectome to refine clinical treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. A key question is which networks should be modulated for improvements of specific symptoms - in disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Depression, or Alzheimer’s Disease. Further, the lab develops methods to segregate the human connectome into functional domains by combining brain stimulation with functional and diffusion-weighted MRI.

"Studding Ageing and Neurodegenerative Brain with Quantitative MRI"

Aviv Mezer is an Associate Professor at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Professor Mezer did his graduate and undergraduate studies in the field of biochemistry at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies at Tel Aviv University, Professor Mezer moved to Stanford and worked with Prof. Brian Wandell as a postdoctoral scholar and research associate.

Research in Mezer’s lab is focused on mapping human brain structures during normal development and aging. In addition, it is focused on developing new approaches to characterize the structural changes associated with neurological disorders. Mezer’s main research tool is in-vivo quantitative magnetic resonance imaging - qMRI. The Mezer lab is developing tools to biophysically explain the brain’s MRI signals at different levels and resolutions: from molecular local sources through cellular organization to the mapping of networks across the entire brain.

Talk: TBD

Bharat Biswal obtained his PhD in Biophysics under the mentorship of Dr James Hyde at the Medical College of Wisconsin. His PhD topic was investigating the noise sources in fMRI. Upon completion of his PhD, he continued working at MCW, first as a Postdoc and then as a faculty. He has been in the Department of Radiology at the New Jersey Medical School from 2001. Since 2012, he is the Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NJIT. His research interests include resting state, fMRI data analysis and methods development.

"Dynamic endocrine modulation of the nervous system"

Emily is an Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara and Director of the Ann S. Bowers Women's Brain Health Initiative at the University of California. She received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Neuroscience from Smith College. Prior to UCSB she was an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Medicine/Division of Women's Health at Brigham & Women's Hospital. Her laboratory uses brain imaging, endocrine, and computational approaches to deepen our understanding of hormone action in the human brain. Major initiatives include the study of endocrine aging during the midlife transition to menopause, pharmacological studies of gonadal hormone suppression, and dense-sampling studies across the menstrual cycle and pregnancy.

She was named a Hellman Fellow, a Brain and Behavior Young Investigator, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar, a National Institutes of Health "BIRCWH" Women's Health Fellow, and a National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science Kavli Fellow for "distinguished young scientists under 45". In 2022, she was named one of ten scientists to watch by Science News. In addition to her research, her lab advocates for diversity in science. Her lab regularly partners with K-12 groups to advance girls' representation in STEM, work that was featured in the book “STEMinists: The Lifework of 12 Women Scientists and Engineers”.

"A roadmap towards precision cortical imaging"

Dr. Emma Robinson is a Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Professor) at King’s College London. She previously held positions with FMRIB, University of Oxford and BioMedIA, Imperial College London, where she obtained her PhD in medical image computing in 2010. She is probably best known for her work developing tools for cortical surface analysis. Most notably, her software for cortical surface registration Multimodal Surface Matching (MSM) was central to the development of the Human Connectome Project’s Multimodal Parcellation of the Human Cerebral cortex, and features in the image processing pipelines for the open-science HCP, dHCP (developing HCP) and UK Biobank projects. This work has been successfully applied to studies of cortical neurodevelopment, neurodegeneration and evolution. More recently, the focus of her lab (https://metrics-lab.github.io) has turned towards the development of explainable AI for diagnostic and forward modelling of neuropsychiatric disease. She sits on the board of Medical Imaging Deep Learning (MIDL) and acts as handling editor for PLOS Computational Biology and Neuroimage.

"Imaging-Guided Chemogenetics: A Window into Nonhuman Primate Brain Circuts and Functions"

Takafumi Minamimoto received his PhD in Neuroscience from Osaka University in 2002 and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2008 at the National Institutes of Health, USA. He then joined the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in 2008, where he currently serves as Leader of the Systems and Neural Circuit Group at the Department of Functional Brain Imaging. His primary research interests include neural mechanism of motivation, emotion and decision-making. He is one of the pioneers in applying chemmogenetic techniques to nonhuman primates. He has successfully combined this technique with PET imaging to visualize and manipulate specific neural circuits, opening up new directions in understanding primate brain function.

"Mapping brain functional and structural differences in ASD: moving toward precision treatment"

Dr. Xujun Duan is a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China. She received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and conducted a Joint PhD study at Stanford University under the supervision of Dr. Vinod Menon. Her long-term research goal is to address how brain anatomy, function and connectivity are altered in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how they vary across the population, by using multi-modal brain imaging techniques and computational methods.

Over the past decade, she has dedicated to delineate a comprehensive and consistent mapping of the abnormal structure and function of the autistic brain, and reaches a consensus that the “social brain” are the most affected regions in the autistic brain at different levels and modalities. She further proposed a personalized functional-connectivity guided brain stimulation strategy targeting the “social brain” to improve social deficits of ASD. She is the PI of 4 research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and awarded the first prize of the Science and Technology Progress Awards of Sichuan Province, China.