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 increases is still an open question. The story of the events and details surrounding this are in his review article from the 2012 NeuroImage special issue. It's titled, simply "The coupling controversy."

Dr. Fox was also among the first to promote data sharing and pooling with his brainmap database, and early on, established stereotactic coordinates and spatial normalization as a way to put data into a shareable space. He started the annual meeting that pre-dated the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, and also founded one of the major brain mapping journals today, titled: Human Brain Mapping.

Peter had his formative undergraduate education at the extremely unique St. Johns college in Annapolis. He received his MD from Georgetown University, interned at Duke University, then carried out his residency and fellowship at Washington University where he worked closely with Dr. Mark Raichle, who was at the time pioneering PET scanning.

In this discussion, we delve into his contributions in a wide range of topics, from neurovascular coupling to the challenge of spatial normalization - particularly at high resolution - to subject variability, to clinical applications and the ongoing evolution of scientific publishing. Lots of history, content, and insight here. We hope you enjoy it!

Notable paper:

Fox PT., The Coupling Controversy, Neuroimage. 2012 Aug 15; 62(2): 594–601. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4019339/

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Stephania Assimopoulos