Alex Fornito

Alex Fornito completed his Clinical Masters (Neuropsychology) and PhD in 2007 in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at The University of Melbourne before undertaking Post-Doctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, UK, under the auspices of an NHMRC Training Fellowship. He is currently a Sylvia and Charles Viertel Foundation Senior Research Fellow, co-Director of the Brain, Mind and Society Research Hub and Head of the Brain Mapping and Modelling Research Program at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health.

Alex's research concentrates on developing new imaging techniques for mapping human brain connectivity and applying these methods to shed light on brain function in health and disease. A major emphasis of his work concerns understanding foundational principles of brain organization and their genetic basis; characterizing brain connectivity disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia; and mapping how brain networks dynamically reconfigure in response to changing task demands

Chandan Vaidya

Chandan Vaidya is Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University and currently serving as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. She is also a faculty in the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at the Georgetown University Medical Center and a Research faculty in the Children’s Research Institute at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC. Her undergraduate studies were in Psychology at Sophia College, Mumbai, India, doctoral studies in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at Syracuse University, New York, and her post-doctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at Stanford University, California.  She joined the Georgetown faculty as Assistant Professor in 2000, and served as Chair of the Department of Psychology from 2015-2020. She received the President’s Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Award in 2018, Georgetown’s highest honor for faculty excelling in research and teaching. She currently serves as a Section Editor for the European Journal of Neuroscience.

She directs the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (DCNL) in the Department of Psychology, which investigates the neurobiological basis of self-regulation in children, its impairment in psychiatric disorders such as Autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and metabolic disorders such as obesity.  Her research involves multidisciplinary methods, comprising behavioral, neuropsychological, and structural and functional brain imaging.

Vaidya teaches courses in cognitive neuroscience at the undergraduate and graduate level and trains doctoral students from two programs, Psychology and Neuroscience, as well as post-doctoral fellows, and clinical faculty from Children’s National Hospital.  Her research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

 Website: https://www.vaidyalab.com/

Charlotte Stagg

Dr Charlotte (Charlie) Stagg is Professor of Human Neurophysiology at the University of Oxford, and Director of Studies for Preclinical Medicine at St Hilda’s College.

Charlie trained in Physiology and Medicine at Bristol University in the UK.  She did her DPhil (PhD) research at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB), using advanced neuroimaging to study how the brain learns new motor skills.  She was then awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St Edmund Hall in Oxford, continuing to be based at FMRIB for her post-doctoral work, with research periods at University College London and the University of Miami, Florida.  

Charlie sits on the MRC Non-clinical Careers Development Panel in the UK, is a Reviewing Editor for the Journal of Physiology, and a Handling Editor at Brain Stimulation.  

Her inter-disciplinary group was founded in 2014 and uses multi-modal neuroimaging and brain stimulation approaches in rodents and humans to understand motor plasticity, both in the context of learning new motor skills and regaining function after a stroke. Her work has two overarching themes: to understand the mechanisms underpinning human motor learning, and to use that understanding to develop novel therapeutic approaches for acquired brain injuries.  She holds a Senior Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust, and her group’s work is also funded by awards from the MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC and the Wellcome Trust.

Charlie lives in the Buckinghamshire countryside with her husband, their two children and the dogs.

Website: https://www.ndcn.ox.ac.uk/research/physiological-neuroimaging-group
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjstagg

Eduardo A. Garza-Villarreal

Dr Eduardo Garza-Villarreal is medical doctor and neuroscience associate professor at the Institute of Neurobiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Querétaro, Mexico. He leads the Translational Neuropsychiatry and Neurotoxicology Lab in the research areas of: Addiction and substance use disorders; identification of neuroimaging biomarkers in humans and animal models; and action mechanisms and possible uses of neuromodulation methods. He is also a promoter and user of Open Science and Open Access initiatives in Latin America.

 Website: https://psilantrolab.xyz

Emily Jacobs

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”.

Helen Zhou

Dr. Juan Helen Zhou is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Sleep and Cognition, and the Director at the Centre for Translational Magnetic Resonance Research, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS. Her laboratory studies selective brain network-based vulnerability in neuropsychiatric disorders using multimodal neuroimaging and computational approaches. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She did her multiple post-doctoral training at the Memory and Aging Centre, University of California, San Francisco, Computational Biology Program at Singapore-MIT Alliance, and Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University before joining Duke-NUS Medical School as a faculty member. Dr. Zhou has also served as a Council member and Program Committee member of OHBM. She also serves on the advisory board of Cell Reports Medicine and as an editor of Human Brain Mapping, Elife, and Communications Biology.

Website: http://neuroimaginglab.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/helenjuanzhou

Jessica Damoiseaux

Dr. Jessica Damoiseaux is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Gerontology and Department of Psychology at Wayne State University. Dr. Damoiseaux received her MSc in Psychology from Utrecht University and PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from VU University Amsterdam. She then went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. She currently heads the Connect Lab. Her research investigates individual differences in typical cognitive and brain aging, and early detection of neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Damoiseaux’s lab uses MRI-based neuroimaging, with an emphasis on brain network approaches, to examine brain aging. Current projects include: Brain changes in cognitively unimpaired older adults experiencing subjective cognitive decline; The effect of a 6-month yoga and aerobic exercise intervention on brain structure and function in older adults; Vascular and brain health in older adults exposed to prenatal undernutrition; and, The association between blood neurofilament light and neuroimaging markers of neurodegeneration.

Website: http://connectlab.wayne.edu/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jsdamoiseaux

Mallar Chakravarty

Mallar Chakravarty is a Computational Neuroscientist and is the leader of the Computational Brain Anatomy (CoBrA Lab) and the Director of the Cerebral Imaging Centre and the NeuroInformatics Platform at Douglas Research Centre. He is also a Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and an Associate Member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University. Mallar is also the Program of Chair of OHBM 2023 and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars.

Dr. Chakravarty received his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University. He went on to do postdoctoral fellowships in Aarhus, Denmark and jointly at the Rotman Research Institute and at the Mouse Imaging Centre (MICe) and the Hospital Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. Between fellowships, Dr. Chakravarty worked at the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Seatte, WA, USA).

He is interested in the anatomy of the brain. His group focuses on how anatomy changes through development, aging, and in illness and how the dynamics of brain anatomy are influenced by genetics and environment.

Marc Seal

Marc Seal currently holds a joint appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne and as Group Leader of the Developmental Imaging Research Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. In this role he is responsible for coordinating and facilitating clinical research utilising the MRI Scanners at the Melbourne Children’s campus and supervise a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, MRI technologists and neuroscientists. He has extensive expertise in paediatric neuroimaging and for the last 12 years his primary role has been to enable and facilitate high quality neurodevelopmental research on the Melbourne Children’s Campus. The work of his team and international collaborators has provided novel information about individual differences in brain development, from birth to adolescence, and, importantly the functional consequences of idiosyncratic variation in these individual developmental trajectories.

Nathan Spreng

Nathan Spreng is the Director of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, Professor at McGill University, and studies how brain networks support various cognitive processes such as remembering information, and how we use this knowledge to influence our decisions. His lab examines large-scale brain network dynamics and their role in cognition. Currently, he investigates attention, memory, cognitive control, and social cognition, and the interacting brain networks that support them. His lab is also actively involved in the development and implementation of multivariate and network-based statistical approaches to assess brain structure, connectivity and activity. In doing so, his lab aims to better understand the properties of brain networks underlying cognitive processes as they change across the lifespan in health and disease.

Randy Gollub

Randy Gollub, MD, PhD, is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry with a secondary appointment in Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she serves as the Associate Director of Translational Research in the Neuroimaging Research Program. She has been on faculty at HMS/MGH since 1993 and is the past-Chair of OHBM.

The focus of Dr. Gollub’s research is at the interface between the technological advancement of neuroimaging acquisition and analysis methods and their application to basic and clinical neuroscience. One of the first investigators to use fMRI to study healthy and disordered human brains, she has contributed to the development and dissemination of best practices for using those technologies through publication of exemplar research studies conducted with collaborators in multiple domains. Studies originating in her lab have used multimodal magnetic resonance neuroimaging acquisitions, including BOLD fMRI, ASL, diffusion and structural scans, to investigate pain and modulation of pain by placebo and integrative medical treatments in healthy subjects and in patients suffering from chronic pain disorders.

Dr. Gollub also has an active research program in the domain of neuroimaging informatics that focuses on the within- and cross-site calibration and validation of neuroimaging data vital to the development of viable biomarkers as well as on technical and logistical efforts to aggregate large datasets for research. She has made multiple contributions including as site PI for a publicly available multi-site clinical imaging investigation of schizophrenia and as a co-developer of the Medical Imaging Informatics Bench to Bedside (mi2b2) workbench and other software tools that enable images acquired during the conduct of clinical care to be used for secondary research purposes. These unique resources for accessing clinical images are integrated directly into the research infrastructure at her home academic healthcare institutions where they are used by hundreds of investigators. She currently has several projects underway using clinically acquired images for the study of MRI metrics of healthy brain development, detection of neonatal brain damage, and the impact of neuropsychiatric disorders on brain structure.

Sofie Valk

Dr Sofie Valk leads the "Cognitive Neurogenetics" group studying how brain structure and function are shaped by genetic and (socio-)environmental factors. Her group is situated at the Max Planck for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and in addition affiliated with the Research Centre Jülich, INM-7, Germany. Her research centres around three main themes: 1) large-scale brain organization; 2) evolution and development; and 3) mind-brain-body interactions.

Stephanie Forkel

Stephanie Forkel is a Principle Investigator and research group leader at the Donders Institute and Associate Professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She leads the Language and Communication Theme that spans three research Institutes and includes 18 group leaders interested in all aspects, from psycholinguistics and genetics to neurobiological aspects of linguistic and communicative functions. She won the prestigious Elizabeth Warrington Prize 2023 and is the OHBM Programme Chair. Her research investigates neurovariability and its impact on cognition across brain states (in health and disease). Understanding what we all share and what makes us unique will change how we approach neurological diagnostics, predictions, and treatments leading to improved precision neuroscience.

Takafumi Minamimoto

Professor Takafumi Minamimoto is a keynote speaker at OHBM 2023, team leader of the Neural Systems and Circuits Research Group, and deputy director of the Department of Functional Brain Imaging at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology in Chiba, Japan. His research focuses on the interaction between motivation, emotion, and memory in the brain of non-human primates. To address these questions, Dr. Minamimoto uses a range of methods including neuroimaging with functional MRI and PET as well as chemogenetic techniques such as Designer Receptors Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs), which are a class of proteins that allow scientists to control neural activity in awake, freely moving animals.

He 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 chemogenetic 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.

Valentina Pacella

Valentina Pacella is an Assistant Professor (M-PSI/02 – Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology) at the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS-Pavia. She graduated in Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Padua. In 2020, she completed a PhD in Cognitive Social and Affective Neuroscience at the Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with the University of Verona. In 2017, she spent a period as visiting researcher at the Istitut du Cerveau (ICM) of the Hospital la Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris. In 2020, she worked as a post-doc in the Neuropsychology Lab (NpsyLab) at the University of Verona. From 2021 to 2022, she was a post-doc in the Neurofunctional Imaging Group (Group de Imagerie Neurofonctionelle, GIN) at the IMN in Bordeaux. She is now a faculty member of the IUSS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre (ICON) at IUSS-Pavia. Since 2017, she has been a member of the international group Brain Connectivity and Behaviour (BCBLab), a research network including the IMN in Bordeaux, the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, and Stanford University. Her research mainly focuses on exploring the latent brain-cognition organisation and identifying new, undetermined cognitive functions in the healthy and damaged brain. The research leverages an interdisciplinary approach that involves experimental neuropsychology, neuroimaging and computational sciences.

Xujun Duan

Dr. Xujun Duan is a keynote speaker at OHBM 2023 and 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.