Neurosalience

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:

Brain Art

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

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 work that spans everything including development, evolution, methodology, and theory. He has been a pioneer in probing brain connectivity and disconnectivity, starting in 2005 with a paper published in science showing that spatial neglect is a consequence of the disruption of communication between the frontal and the parietal lobes, and thus should be considered as a disconnection syndrome. Since then, he has been a highly prolific producer of creative, insightful, and high impact work exploring and characterizing structural and functional brain connectivity.

Here we talk about the development of his career and his ideas as well as the importance of thinking of the brain from a connectivity perspective. We delve into some of his recent papers, including one that highlights differences in various MRI methods to measure myelin, and finally, we discuss how OHBM has evolved along with the role of the president of OHBM, as well as a few things that the meeting has in store for this year.

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to [email protected]

Thank you for listening to this season of Neurosalience! We'll be back in a few months time with Season 4!

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

1. BrainArt: 

https://ohbm-brainart.github.io/

2. Open Science:

https://ossig.netlify.app/

3. Student and Postdoc:

https://www.ohbmtrainees.com/

4. Sustainability and Environmental Action:

https://ohbm-environment.org/

5. Women in OHBM:

https://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/blog/announcing-the-launch-of-the-women-in-ohbm-special-interest-group recent

COMMITTEES

1. Diversity and Inclusion:

Kid's live review: https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/ 

2. Education: 

https://www.humanbrainmapping.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4204

3. Communications (ComCom):

https://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/

Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Stephania Assimopoulos

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to

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, registered reports, and more. It will be heavily weighing the assessment of submitted papers based on their utility and transparency rather than just their novelty. In the future, Aperture Neuro aims to seamlessly support other objects such as code, data, notebooks, and videos, and is currently looking into mechanisms for handling these without compromising on quality or efficiency.

For more information about the journal, go to apertureneuro.org

Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Stephania Assimopoulos

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to

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 organization to the mapping of networks across the entire brain.

In this interview, we discuss the field of qMRI more broadly, touching upon the present and future interpretations ‘in vivo histology’. We also discuss Dr Mezer’s approach to mentorship, as well as the skills that would benefit future researchers in this field.

At OHBM 2023, Dr. Mezer will show us how combining multiple quantitative MRI measures can provide additional biological information about tissue composition and brain health. 

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 brain stimulation on the connectome can be studied, and how it can be used to improve patients lives.  “In contrast to many other neuroimaging domains, there is a more or less direct translation [..] to clinical practice”, says Dr Horn, and explains how for example networks that have been identified via DBS can later be targeted with noninvasive stimulation methods such as multifocal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), for example to improve patients’ conditions in movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Among many other things, Dr Horn also lets us in on an informally ongoing challenge at Harvard University whether structural or functional measures provide better predictions for DBS outcomes. He explains why his lab has gradually shifted away from using patient specific connectivity data to precise normative connectomes for studying which brain networks should optimally be modulated for maximal effects.

In his  keynote at OHBM 2023, Dr Horn will give us a tour through his findings from years of work studying the effects of deep brain stimulation on the connectome across different disorders, ranging across neurological, neuropsychiatric and psychiatric diseases. He will illustrate how his findings can be transferred across disorders to inform one another and how they can be further used to inform neurocognitive effects and behaviors such as risk-taking and impulsivity.