Neurosalience

“What does it actually mean to understand the brain?”

Dr. Kendrick Kay is a computational neuroscientist and neuroimaging expert at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology. With training spanning philosophy and neuroscience, from a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Harvard University to a PhD in neuroscience from UC Berkeley, Dr. Kay’s work bridges deep theoretical questions with cutting-edge neuroimaging methods.

In this conversation, Peter Bandettini and Kendrick Kay explore the evolving landscape of neurosc...

"AI is really bad at perspective taking…"

Dr. Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann is a cognitive neuroscientist exploring how the human social brain takes shape in early life. She is a Professor at the University of Technology Nuremberg and directs the Research Group on Social Brain Development at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. Her research blends developmental psychology, brain imaging, and computational modeling to uncover how infants begin to infer other people’s beliefs, intentions and mental states. 

In this conversation, Dr. Wiesmann unpacks how children’s brains develop the capacit...

"I really enjoy good conversations..."

In this episode, we look back at the highlights from last season and share some fun insights from our audience metrics. We’re celebrating six years of Neurosalience, and we’re excited for the incredible guests and topics coming up this season.

We hope you enjoy this episode!

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction to season 6

01:43 - Highlights from season 5

07:55 - Reflections on the podcast's impact

20:36 - Discussion on the DIANA paper retraction

27...

Early career researchers give their perspectives on being an academic today. With Arshiya  Sangchooli, Natasha L. Taylor, Ashlea Segal, Stefano Moia, Jiajia Yang, and Peter Bandettini Episode ProducersOmer Faruk GulbanXuqian Michelle Li

Peter Bandettini interviews Dr. Rosanna Olsen, a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute and the University of Toronto. She is pioneering what we know about human memory and its associated structures, primarily focusing on the hippocampus, the role it plays, and how it changes with age and neurological diseases. Her work has shed light on how the hippocampus facilitates the flexible binding and comparison of new and existing information. She has also shown how visual exploration reveals memory processes, and has uncovered promising early dementia biomarkers based on measures of visual exploration and hippocampus. Dr. Olsen is also...

This OHBM preview podcast offers an in-depth look at how the OHBM Annual Meeting is organized, along with reflections on the unique character of the meeting and the broader OHBM community. Peter Bandettini hosts Jean Chen, Marta Garrido, and Lena Oestreich, with Kevin Sitek serving as co-host. Michael Breakspear joins the discussion in the final 20 minutes. The conversation covers both logistical and thematic aspects of the meeting, providing valuable context for attendees and those interested in the field.

Episode ProducersXuqian Michelle LiKarthik Sama

In this episode Peter Bandettini, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Aina Puce and Michael Breakspear discuss the future of scientific publishing.Episode ProducersOmer Faruk GulbanXuqian Michelle Li

Join host Peter Bandettini as he interviews Michael Milham, a pioneer in functional brain imaging and big data neuroscience. In this episode, Dr. Milham shares insights from his groundbreaking work on large-scale fMRI datasets, deep phenotyping, and the future of precision psychiatry.Topics include: - Challenges and opportunities in big data MRI - Individual variability in brain imaging - Resting-state fMRI and pipeline reliability - Integrating multimodal and real-world data - AI, machine learning, and biomarkers in psychiatryDr. Milham is Chief Science Officer at the Child Mind Institute and a leader behind major initiatives like the creation of large...

In this episode of the OHBM Neurosalience Podcast, host Peter Bandettini sits down with Dr. Simon Eickhoff, a leading clinician-scientist in brain mapping. As a panelist at the 2024 OHBM meeting in Seoul, Dr. Eickhoff brought fascinating insights—this conversation picks up where that discussion left off.Dr. Eickhoff, a professor and director at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and Forschungszentrum Jülich, works at the crossroads of neuroanatomy, data science, and brain medicine. His research focuses on understanding individual differences in brain organization, aging, and psychiatric disorders using machine learning and large-scale neuroimaging analysis.Topics include: - The challenges of deri...

This episode features Dr. Sepideh Sadaghiani directing the CONNECTlab at Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Sadaghiani’s lab explores large-scale brain networks, focusing on cognitive control, attention, and spontaneous neural activity. Using fMRI, EEG, and genetics, they uncover how brain connectivity shapes perception and behavior. Tune in for cutting-edge insights into the brain’s dynamic communication.

Episode Producers

Omer Faruk Gulban

Karthik Sama

This episode features Prof. Mac Shine from the University of Sydney. Mac is a systems neurobiologist interested in understanding how neurobiology supports awareness and flexible, parallel behavior. This engaging conversation between Peter and Mac offers takeaways for neuroscience from the study of other complex systems, such as weather patterns. It further explores how principles from fluid dynamics could inspire ways to rethink brain states and interpret fMRI data. The discussion also highlights the inherently interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience and emphasizes the crucial role of communication between its subfields as the field navigates these exciting times. For more details check...

Join Peter Bandettini as he sits down with Seiji Ogawa, the visionary scientist behind the discovery of BOLD (blood oxygenation level-dependent) contrast fMRI. In this insightful conversation, Dr. Ogawa reflects on his groundbreaking work, the evolution of neuroimaging, and the challenges of translating fMRI into clinical practice. 1. Ogawa’s Early Journey – From Stanford to Bell Labs, and the influences that shaped his career. 2. The Discovery of BOLD fMRI – How experiments with hemoglobin oxygenation laid the foundation for modern neuroimaging. 3. Impact on Neuroscience – Why fMRI became a cornerstone in understanding brain function. 4. Challenges in Clinical Translation – Variability and reliability in single-sub...

Our guest today is Dr. Vesa Kiviniemi, a radiologist and researcher at Oulu University in Finland.

Dr. Kiviniemi’s recent focus has been on using an extremely high-speed MRI technique called MREG. This technique allows for the collection of an entire volume of data with a TR of just 100 milliseconds, using a stack-of-spirals approach. The reason he values this technique so much is that it enables him to examine various types of brain pulsations, including cardiac and respiratory pulsations, as well as what he refers to as glymphatic or CSF pulsations.

This episode is unique in the sense that it’s actually a talk Peter gave during the OHBM 2024 meeting, specifically during the education session on communicating science.

Peter wanted to share this talk because it focuses on the podcast and his own approach to creating it. He discusses his philosophy, heuristics, what he considers important about podcasting, and why he enjoys doing it. The talk emphasizes the value of conversation and explains how the podcast showcases the human side of scientific investigators and the stories behind their research.

We ho...

In this episode, Peter Bandettini interviews Matthew Cobb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cobb), the author of the book “The idea of the brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience”.

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

Our guest is today is Dr. Alan Evans. He completed his Ph.D. (1979) and post-doctoral fellowship studying structure-function interaction of proteins at the Department of Biophysics at Leeds University in the U.K.  Subsequently he worked for five years as a PET physicist at Atomic Energy of Canada in Ottawa.

In 1984, he joined the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University, where his research interests include multimodal brain imaging with PET and MRI, structural network modelling, and large scale neural informatics.

For the past 40 years, he has been an institution at McGill University. He i...

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.

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 F...

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 F...

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...

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 conversation with 2024 Keynote Speaker Nicola Palomero-Gallagher TODO: Link to blog post Interviewers: - Naomi L. Gaggi - Beatriz Padrela

A conversation with 2024 Keynote Lecture presenter Luis Concha

https://www.ohbm-com.com/blog/a-conversation-with-keynote-speaker-luis-concha

Interviewers:

- Eduardo A. Garza-Villarreal

- Diana Giraldo

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...

A conversation with 2024 Keynote Lecture presenter Mac Shine https://www.ohbm-com.com/blog/a-conversation-with-dr-mac-shine-ohbm-2024-keynote-interview-series-pt3 Interviewers: - Alfie Wearn - Xuqian Michelle Li

A conversation with 2024 Talairach Lecture presenter Zarin Machanda

https://www.ohbm-com.com/blog/a-conversation-with-2024-talairach-lecture-presenter-zarin-machanda

Interviewers: - Elisa Guma - Lavinia Uscatescu

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...

This episode’s guest is arguably one of the most influential scientists in the human brain mapping community. Dr. Peter Fox, director of the Research Imaging Institute at the University of Texas Health, San Antonio. Early in his career he wrote the seminal paper that showed, using positron emission tomography , that brain-activation related increases in blood flow are accompanied by only small increases in oxidative metabolic -  resulting in the blood locally increasing in oxygenation. This paper set the foundation for understanding all of Blood Oxygen Level Dependent Contrast used in fMRI today. The true purpose of activation-related flow inc...

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 pr...

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...

Today, we are excited to have Dr. Gang Chen on the podcast. Dr. Chen is the go-to statistics guru for the fMRI community at the NIH and a well-respected scientist worldwide. He is a staff scientist in the group that developed the AFNI software package. As an applied mathematician, Dr. Chen has written a series of insightful papers in the past seven years, bucking the status quo in fMRI processing - essentially saying that we are throwing away too much valuable information by thresholding our data, relying on overly simple and rigid models of the hemodynamic response, not mapping...

In this episode, it's our pleasure to host Jack Wells who is a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the University College London Center for Advanced Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Wells received his Ph.D. in MRI in the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering at  at University College London in 2010, and since he began his scientific career, he's been working at the interface of MRI methodology and neurophysiology - focusing on understanding the Cerebral Spinal Fluid dynamics and how they may relate to the Glymphatic system. He and his colleagues have been among the leaders in using MRI to i...

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...

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...

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. M...

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 "...

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...

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 am...

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...

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...

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!

In the final episode of Season 3 of Neurosalience, Peter chats with Michele Thiebaut de Shotten. Michele is a full professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris where he heads the Brain Connectivity and Behavior Lab and the Neurofunctional Imaging Group. On top of all this he is Editor in Chief of the journal Brain Structure and Function and, this year, has been the President of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

Having over 15 years of experience in neuropsychology and brain connectivity neuroimaging, he has established himself as a leader in the field with...

The 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting is fast approaching! In addition to the fantastic scientific content organized by the Program Committee, many other committees and special interest groups (SIGs) host their own programs. At last year’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow, committees and SIGs hosted events on inclusivity, mentorship, art, and much more.

In this podcast, Peter and Alfie highlight upcoming committee and SIG events at OHBM 2023.

Further information on all these events, including exact times and places, can be found in this accompanying blog post:

Other useful links:

SIGs

In this episode, Peter talks with Mallar Chakravarty about the imminent relaunch of the journal Aperture Neuro, which, a few years ago, was created and supported through OHBM.

Here we learn what happened with the first version of Aperture Neuro, what lessons were learned, and what the relaunched version of Aperture offers that is truly unique and valuable to the field. It is non-profit and open access with an APC of 800 dollars for members. It provides an avenue for many different kinds of papers, from typical original research to editorials, tutorials, conference summaries, book reviews, r...

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

Research in Dr. 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...

Dr Horn is a medical scientist with training in neuroimaging, movement disorders, software development and both invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation and the group leader of the Network Stimulation Laboratory at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital Boston and Charité – University Medicine Berlin. His main interest and research focus lies in the development and  improvement of  methods to analyze brain stimulation sites to study network interactions of neuromodulation in the human brain. He is also the host of a podcast focusing on brain stimulation.

In the interview with Dr Horn we explore how the impact of deep br...

Dr. Emma Robinson is a Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Professor) at King’s College London. Her development of the Multimodal Surface Matching (MSM) software for cortical surface registration has been instrumental to the development of the Human Connectome Project’s multimodal parcellation of the human cortex. She is currently developing interpretable machine learning models to aid in the personalized prediction of disease progression. In this interview, Dr.Robinson describes the advantages of interpretable machine learning models, and the methodological challenges she faced during the development of this framework.

Her approach to identifying disease-related changes in individual brain scans atte...

Dr. Emily Jacobs is an Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and the director of the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Health Initiative at University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in Neuroscience from Smith College. Prior to UCSB, she was an instructor at Harvard Medical School and at the Department of Medicine/Division of Women’s Health at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. 

In this episode we discuss the pioneering work of Dr. Jacobs and her group in leveraging brain imaging, computation, and endocrine approac...

Hongkui Zeng is Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Her current research interests focus on 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, she has built several research programs using transcriptomic, connectomic and multimodal approaches. What unifies each of these programs is their shared goal to characterize and classify the wide variety of cell types that constitute the mammalian brain, laying the foundation for unraveling the cell type...

This week on #Neurosalience we have two guests, Dr. Natalie Voets and Dr. Andreas Bartsch, who have both been working together to advance the use of fMRI as a complementary yet promising and important technique for guiding neurosurgery. Along with clinical researchers around the world, they have been writing a massive white paper for the OHBM Best Practices Committee on the presurgical mapping of language function. They were also both co-authors on a clear and comprehensive 2022 paper published in the British Journal of Neurosurgery, titled: “Functional MRI applications for intra-axial brain tumors: uses and nuances in surgical practice” 

Her...

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss the recent editorial team resignations at NeuroImage over open access publishing charges and the start of the new journal Imaging Neuroscience. We have two of the senior editors of NeuroImage, Sonja Kotz from Mastricht University, and Shella Keilholz from Emory and Georgia Tech who give us a bit more insight into the factors leading up to the resignation, and what will be happening moving forward as the editors migrate from Elsevier to a non-profit company, MIT press.

Sonja Kotz and Shella Keilholz have been with NeuroImage for many years, and in...

Today our guest is Hiromasa Takemura, the 2022 OHBM Early Career Investigator Award winner! He is the 26th recipient of this prestigious award, joining a group of investigators who made an impact early in their career, and have continued to do so. Dr Takemura’s work has impacted the field mostly as it has traversed between tract tracing and basic systems neuroscience. In combining those two fields his impact has been enormous.

Dr Takemura is a professor in the Division of Sensory and Cognitive Brain Mapping in the Department of System Neuroscience and also a professor at t...

Today our guest is Dr. Audrey Fan, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biomedical Engineering. She also serves as co-director of the Imaging Core for UC Davis Health's Alzheimer’s Disease Center, an NIH-funded Alzheimer’s research center.

Dr. Fan is an imaging physicist and translational scientist. She develops novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) methods to study brain physiology in cerebrovascular disease and vascular dementia. She has translated new imaging technologies to patient studies in acute stroke, Moyamoya disease and intracranial stenosis.

She received her...

Today, our guest is Dr. Stephanie Forkel, a Donders Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor at Radboud University, studying the impact of neural variability on cognition in health and disease. In 2013, she received her PhD in neuroimaging at King's College in London where she helped establish an understanding that neurovariability is critical for prediction of recovery after stroke. Over her academic career she has continued to develop this line of work and has trained in many different places, including University of Salzburg, The National University of Ireland in Galway, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Klinikum Großhadern in Germany, University of Gre...

Today, my guest is Dr. Todd Constable, a Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale University. He is also director of MRI Research in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology in the Yale School of Medicine.

Todd received his PhD in 1990 in Medical Physics from the University of Toronto, then moved to Yale for his post-doc and has been there ever since. While his training was in physics, he has clearly become a neuroscientist as well - having been working in fMRI since the early 90’s. He still is active in bo...

Today, our guest is Dr. Matthew Wall, head of MRI applications at Invicro, a London-based company that explores ways to advance personalized medicine.

Matthew received his Ph.D. in 2003 in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Cambridge and until 2006, performed a post doc at Royal Holloway. He joined the company, Glaxo-Smith Kline in 2009, which then became Imanova in 2012 and then more recently, Invicro.

Dr. Wall is a medical imaging specialist - working on both methods and applications - and mostly using fMRI. HIs initial training was in experimental psychology, but he's since studied...

In this discussion, we cover her work on characterizing the variability of coherence as it relates to aging and how this coherence is increased by providing subject with ketones - an alternate source of energy to glucose. We then go into her work in modeling brain circuits and determining where the circuitry is altered across trajectories of disorders. In this context, we briefly discuss her work characterizing the effects on amygdala activation by different composition of inhaled perspiration - either that produced in a fear state vs that produced through exercise. Lastly, we discuss her lab’s work on ne...

The OHBM Communications Committee, otherwise called ComCom, was created in 2015 to address the growing need to enhance communication between the society members and leadership. It has rapidly grown, both in number of members and in its reach and impact,  fostering a presence in social media, establishing a website and a blog, increasing connections to lay media, and recently, starting up and putting in the time to support the podcast OHBM Neurosalience. In general, communication is so absolutely fundamental in science and in any organization. The quality of how information is captured and disseminated directly determines the vibrancy of a f...

In the episode, we sit down with Jeff Binder , M.D. to discuss fMRI from its origins, to its limitations and its future.

Jeff Binder , M.D. is a professor and Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In 1980, he received his BA in Music. In 1986, received is M.D. from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. After further clinical and research training at University of Nebraska Medical Center, Northwestern University, and the Neurological Institute of New York a Presbyterian Hospital, he started at MCW in 1992 where he...

In this discussion, we start with his pioneering work on developing susceptibility contrast for imaging perfusion while at MGH, and then his pioneering work on developing Near Infrared Spectroscopy, and using this approach to help validate fMRI contrast and shed some light on it. After this we discuss a wide range of topics that his group has been working on - falling into the categories of either methods development or mind-body interactions. He has played a major role in many insightful studies that include those using simultaneous EEG and fMRI, and looking at neuromodulation, brain plasticity, subliminal stimulation and...

Seong-Gi Kim, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Washington University in 1988 for investigating blood flow using NMR spectroscopy, and did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington on the determination of biomolecular structure by NMR. Early on, Dr. Kim embraced the difficult but penetrating work of fMRI on animal models. He has since been leading the world pushing the limits of our understanding of the biologic underpinnings of fMRI contrast towards answering systems neuroscience questions. Since 2013, Dr. Kim has been director of the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (CNIR) at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea.<...

Real-time neurofeedback fMRI is a unique and powerful kind of fMRI involving real time feedback of brain activity to the subject towards the goal of enhancing or suppressing activity or connectivity, and ultimately changing behavior. Michal’s work has taken real time neurofeedback fMRI to the next level, embracing operant conditioning to alter measured fMRI network activity independent of the subject’s awareness or conscious control. Here Peter and Michal discuss all the types of neurofeedback-based fMRI, focusing mostly on her implicit neurofeedback studies.  They discuss the real time fMRI feedback setup as well as the potential applications - for u...

The discovery of resting state fMRI ushered in an entirely new subfield of fMRI and a new era in functional imaging that permeates much of what we do today. Today’s guest, Professor Bharat Biswal is credited with the discovery of this signal. In this conversation Professor Biswal recounts the events leading up to and including his discovery of the resting state signal. He and Peter also talk about all things resting state fMRI, including white matter correlations and potential clinical applications. He even turns the tables on Peter, and asks a few questions of his own. This is wo...

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss an exciting new paper published in Science on October 14 2022 that caused quite a stir, titled: In vivo direct imaging of neuronal activity at high temporospatial resolution. In this paper, they show clear maps and timecourses of directly measured neuronal activity as it occurs, at 5 milliseconds resolution. This interview is with professor Jang-Yeon Park who is the senior author and advisor to graduate student and first author Phan Tan Toi both at SKKU in South Korea.

In their beautiful paper, they demonstrate a series of stunning experiments that provide exciting new and...

This week on Neurosalience, something a little different: a live podcast recorded at the OHBM 2022 Annual Meeting featuring a continuation of a discussion of the recent paper "Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals" by Scott Marek et al. This paper set the stage for some great discussions about what it means for the field and its broader implications for brain research (see Season 2 Episode 21 for a discussion with the authors: https://bit.ly/3T1lWu8). For the live podcast we are joined by four leaders in the field whose research is very related and hinges on the...

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss one very cool and very useful fMRI acquisition strategy called Multi-echo EPI. While it’s been around for over 20 years, only a fraction of papers reporting fMRI results have used it. It can help quite a bit towards increasing sensitivity, mitigating signal dropout and motion artifacts, and stabilizing the time series to allow for tracking of very slow changes. Recent papers have come out showing that it significantly helps increase sensitivity and mitigate artifacts. In fact, several prominent leaders in the field are embracing it as they are convinced it's essential for increasing th...

Welcome a brand-new season of Neurosalience!

In this episode, Peter Bandettini speaks with new podcast production lead Alfie Wearn about the podcast, the changes this season, and what we can look forward to in season 3.

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Anastasia Brovkin

Stephania Assimopoulos.

Brain Art

Artist: Sina Mansour

Title: Dreaming Connectomes

Description: Connectome images transformed using Deep dream AI

In this bonus episode, Peter Bandettini talks to four co-authors from a recent Nature paper on “Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals.” Scott Marek, Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, Damien Fair and Nico Dosenbach discuss their work, demonstrating that to make reproducible associations between MRI measures (both structural and functional) and behavioral measures, upwards of 2000 subjects are required.

The panel discuss the strong reaction across the field to this paper, and how the results fit with the known strong and robust signal from fMRI. They consider why the effect size is essentially three orders of magnitude smaller when tryi...

Over the thirty-nine episodes of this podcast, Peter Bandettini, PhD (twitter: @fmri_today), has guided interesting conversations with brain scientists of all types about the latest developments, controversies, findings, and challenges in the field of brain mapping. Of course, Dr. Bandettini is an impressive and fascinating scientist in his own right, so we on the Neurosalience production team thought it was time to turn things around and shine the spotlight on Peter.

About our "guest": Dr. Bandettini is Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as Director o...

Eric Wong is Professor and Associate Director for Imaging Hardware at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1991 from the Medical College of Wisconsin where he was the key person in starting fMRI at the Medical College of Wisconsin. 

In this podcast, Eric and Peter start by revisiting when they first met and the flurry of excitement and activity when fMRI was just starting - at the time when they were both graduate students. They talk about Eric’s work in MRI hardware, perfusion imaging, and MRI physics, and then tra...

Randy McIntosh, Ph.D. has been a scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre at the University of Toronto since 1994 and, since the start of 2022, is the new Director of the Simon Fraser University Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology in Burnaby British Columbia - just outside of Vancouver.

Randy obtained his PhD in 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin in Psychology and Neuroscience and did a postdoc at the NIH with Barry Horwitz until 1994. His group uses neuroimaging and computational modeling to understand the dynamics of healthy brains as well as those from many...

Today we are discussing the general question of how neuroimaging (and mostly fMRI) fit into the landscape of neuroscience research approaches. More specifically we discuss the question of what, over the years, has neuroimaging taught us about the brain? In this fascinating discussion, we work through many related topics and get a solid sense of Dr. Passingham’s perspectives on these - including his views on mentoring, a critique or refinement of David Marr’s three criteria for understanding the brain, the need to put forth falsifiable hypotheses, his enthusiasm for for Optically Pumped Magnetometers, and the need for an a...

In this episode Dr Peter Bandettini and co-host Dr Brendan Ritchie interview Dr Grace Lindsay. They find out about her new book 'Models of the mind' and about the process of writing a book. In doing so, they consider different types of brain models, from simply descriptive to more mechanistic, from too simple to overfitted. They describe the challenge in neuroscience of network modelling - the many unknowns and limited data and how output of the model may help inform its accuracy. They then discuss specific models, such as Deep Neural Networks, and how this type of modelling may...

In this episode, we discuss what was important to Pedro early in his career. He describes his first forays into clinical use of EEG back in the 70s and then we go on to discuss some of his highly creative work in deeply interpreting EEG signals today. Later we discuss his current visiting position in Chengdu, China and a growing EEG database as well as his international consortium. We touch briefly on the current state of medical care in Cuba as well as how Cuba has dealt with COVID-19. This episode was recorded on October 22nd 2021. 

Guest: 

Peter talks to Dr. Lucina Uddin about the constant struggle shared by all scientists in the field of neuroimaging to find the right paradigms, acquisition tools, and analysis approaches to add insight into fundamentals of brain organization and how it relates to behavior. They talk about cognitive flexibility, Autism, the salience network, and the need for an ontology of network nomenclature so that the field can better communicate, share, and understand findings. They also discuss the NIH’s goal of having a research domain criteria (RDoC) to organize and understand disorders in a more brain data-driven manner. Lastly, they di...

Functional MRI is a profoundly successful and powerful technique that so many of us use. It’s still developing and adding to our insight about the human brain. While MRI was developed in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, it would be another decade before it was realized that MRI could be used to detect and map, non-invasively, human brain activation. My guests today, Ken Kwong, Bob Turner, and Ravi Menon were the first who showed this capability. Ken’s successful experiment in early May of 1991 was arguably the first. Ravi, who was the key player in the Minnesota group, h...

Maurizio Corbetta is Full Professor and Chair of Neurology in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also the founding director of the new Padua Neuroscience Center, a highly interdisciplinary research programme centered on the idea of brain networks in health and society.

After receiving is M.D. from the University of Pavia in Italy, he carried out a residency in Neurology at the University of Verona. In 1990 he moved to US, carting out a fellowship in NeuroImaging at Barnes Hospital at Wash U in St. Louis. While in St. Louis, he...

Guest: Anastasia Yendiki is a faculty member at the MGH Martinos center and a member of the Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging (LCN).  Her background is in statistical signal and image processing. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she worked on inverse problems in tomographic reconstruction for nuclear imaging. As a postdoctoral research fellow at the Martinos Center, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, she trained in functional and diffusion-weighted MRI. She is responsible for the development of the diffusion MRI analysis tools in FreeSurfer, including TRACULA (TRActs C...

Denis LeBihan, M.D., Ph.D., is a clinician and physicist, a relentless innovator in the field of MRI and fMRI since the late 80’s, and—as we hear in this podcast—a broad, deep, and highly creative thinker who remains passionate about his work. Denis is the founding director of NeuroSpin in Orsay, France and spends time in Japan as a guest professor at the University of Kyoto and National Institutes of Physical Sciences in Okazaki.  

Denis Le Bihan has achieved international recognition for his truly fundamental contributions to the development of diffusion MRI, diffusion tensor imaging...

In this episode Peter Bandettini speaks with the Chairs of three large neuroimaging societies: Randy Gollub from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), Fernando Calamante from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and Ron Mangun from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Together they consider how COVID-19 has impacted the annual meetings of these societies and some of the innovative strategies used to increase interactivity at online or hybrid meetings.  For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit: www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com

Dr. Xavier Castellanos is a psychiatrist and a highly influential scientist who has been working in neuroimaging for over 20 years towards the goal of leveraging MRI, fMRI and other approaches to better understand and treat children and adults with psychiatric disorders.

Xavier Castellanos studied Chomskian linguistics at Vassar College, experimental psychology at the University of New Orleans, and medicine at Louisiana State University in Shreveport - receiving his M.D. in 1986. He was in the first cohort of “triple board” residents (combined training in pediatrics, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry) at the University of Kentucky. In 1991, he c...

In this episode Peter Bandettini meets with Drs Lieneke Janssen and Gisela Govaart to discuss grassroots open science projects. They consider how Lieneke & Gisela got started, what is unique about their group (that it is purely student/postdoc driven), what initiatives they are taking on, the need for open science, and how to incentivize people to embrace open science. For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit: www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com

This is our second episode with Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The first podcast with him delved so deeply into his approach to assessing fMRI data and his philosophy of doing good science and good fMRI that Peter felt they didn’t get a chance to talk about Jack’s groundbreaking results and what questions they open up. In this episode, Peter and Jack discuss his fascinating and potent...

MRI is ultimately about separating a known but variable signal from highly variable noise. How one does this makes all the difference. fMRI is particularly challenging since what is signal and what is noise is not always clear, as they both vary in time and space. In this episode, Peter talks to Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a huge proponent of fMRI encoding or, more generally, ca...

Peter talks to Bob Cox, Ph.D., Gang Chen, Ph.D. and Paul Taylor, Ph.D. about AFNI. AFNI is a major processing package used by brain mapping groups all over the world. It is nearly as old as fMRI itself, and has been steadily growing in functionality. Here we discuss the history of how it all started as well as a few of the challenges of fMRI processing that have arisen over the years. Importantly, time is spent discussing more of the philosophy of data analysis and visualization. A key tenet that AFNI has always encouraged is the...

Peter talks to Dr. Nikola Stikov, a professor of Biomedical Engineering, a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute, and co-director of NeuroPoly, the Neuroimaging Research Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal. Nikola is a physicist, engineer and a strong proponent of quantitative and reproducible MRI for further clinical traction and impact. This involves promoting open science, creating shared analysis toolboxes, and fostering data and code sharing across researchers and vendors. As mature as MRI is, we are still just scratching the surface of what information it can provide. Nikola is a gifted and passionate communicator; this conversation touches on his research...

This week, Peter talks to Dr. Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist who has worked for more than fifteen years in the field of altered states of consciousness such as vegetative state, sleep and anesthesia. In this wide ranging discussion, Peter and Melanie address everything related to her work on consciousness.  They start with some of her early work on resting state as a modulator for detecting subtle stimuli and then get into a discussion on a working definition of consciousness and her work on understanding the neural correlates of consciousness. Melanie is a proponent of the idea that m...

Welcome back to Neurosalience! In this episode Peter Bandettini talks to production lead, Dr Rachael Stickland. They discuss the best bits and themes from season 1 and what to expect from season 2. 

This episode focuses on layer activity fMRI, an important and rapidly emerging area of neuroimaging research. Layer fMRI opens up the possibility of mapping directional communication channels between active brain regions. Peter discusses the challenges, limits and opportunities of ultra-high resolution fMRI with four leaders in this research field - Rainer Goebel, David Feinberg, Jon Polimeni & Renzo Huber.

In this podcast, Peter talks to Dr. David Poeppel, a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU). Peter and David discuss how MRI and other imaging modalities may play a part in truly understanding the brain as well as what it even means to understand the brain. They discuss David’s past work with Greg Hickok on language pathways, and his work in the auditory cortex. Another topic discussed is the potential impact of David’s work clinically as well as the need to start with, and progressively add to, models of the brain.

Michael Breakspear, Ph.D. is a physicist and psychiatrist and the leader of the Systems Neuroscience and Translational Neuroimaging Group at the Hunter Medical Research Institute at the University of Newcastle in Australia. In this wide ranging discussion, Peter talks to Michael about his motivations for dynamic modeling of the brain and how his research may pay off in the long run towards clinical applications. Michael is also the Editor in Chief of the journal NeuroImage; there is discussion of some of the changes that have occurred, such as new types of papers, new policies on data sharing, and...

Dr. Ahmad Hariri is Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where he is also the Director of the Laboratory of NeuroGenetics. Dr. Hariri recently published an important paper on the test-retest reliability of common task-fMRI measures. This received attention in the field and from the popular media and generated useful discussions. In this podcast Peter and Ahmad discuss the implications of this paper and how to address the challenges it presents and continue to move the field forward. This is an informative and positive discussion about how to collectively address these issues as a field.

This podcast idea was precipitated by Dimitri Kullman’s 2020 editorial in Brain, causing a stir in the community. It levelled criticism about the clinical validity of fMRI. Some of it was outdated but some was indeed on point.  In this podcast we had a great discussion on all things fMRI -  what it can and cannot measure, and how it can continue to proceed. We also discuss some of the scientific culture surrounding fMRI. Overall, the discussion was useful in bringing some of the flaws as well as some of the outstanding innovations to light. We ended up agreeing that...

Here Peter Bandettini has a wide  ranging discussion with the 2021 Early Career Investigator Awardee, Chao-Gan Yan. They talk a bit about his career path, the highly impactful work he has been doing, as well as some of the most challenging issues in fMRI: dealing with motion, variability, finding biomarkers, and designing just the right packages that help the beginner and  expert alike. Chao-Gan gives some great advice to new investigators regarding what was important to him to get him where he is today.

In this week's episode, Peter discusses the history of the Open Science Special Interest Group and the unique and important role this group plays in OHBM, alongside Janine Bijsterbosh, Johanna Bayer, Katie Bottenhorn, Melvin Selim Atay and Aki Nikolaidis. The OHBM Open Science Special Interest Group fosters open science not only by encouraging best practices and sharing data and code, but by encouraging inclusivity in science and open ended discussion in a supportive environment.

Join host Peter Bandettini as he talks with Dr. Nikolaus Weiskopf, Director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

In this episode of NeuroSalience, Peter chats with Alex about connectomics, or the study of the brain’s networks of connections. We discuss Alex’s work leveraging the Allen Brain Atlas (https://portal.brain-map.org/) and fMRI to better understand the genetic basis of the network structure. He points out clear differences between network hubs and other network components, with hubs having important roles in resting state dynamics and in neurological disorders. We also discuss the ongoing challenge of removing physiological noise from the fMRI signal in the context of his new and powerful methods for dissecting it out. Last...

In this episode, Peter Bandettini meets with Tom Nichols, Remi Gau and Jack Van Horn to discuss the motivation for a set of best reporting and analysis practices. This provides insight into how the COBIDAS (Committee on Best Practice in Data Analysis and Sharing) in OHBM was started. They talk about the reproducibility crisis in fMRI and how it is being addressed. They discuss how the culture of fMRI has changed from isolated scientists doing N=20 studies to a connected web of researchers collecting and contributing to fMRI databases of high quality data for the purpose of revealing ever...