Fellows
Danielle Bassett
Biography
Danielle Bassett is a postdoctoral research associate in the Complex Systems Group of the Physics Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is affiliated with the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, and performs interdisciplinary work in the area of complex network science. The majority of her work to date has focused on the characterization of large-scale functional and structural connectivity patterns in the human brain, in addition to examining the relationship between these patterns and cognitive ability, task and disease.
Craig Bennet
Biography:
Craig Bennett is a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Dr. Michael Miller at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained his PhD in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College in 2008, working with Abigail Baird and George Wolford. The focus of his research has been the investigation of new methods to quantify inter-individual differences in regional brain activity during cognitive tasks. In a traditional group fMRI analysis much of the subject-to-subject variability is thrown out and considered to be noise. However, a range of studies have demonstrated there is a large amount of information present in the differing patterns of brain activity. The question that drives his current research is how much information we can extract from this variability.
Jesse Brown
Biography:
Jesse is currently a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience program at UCLA. He works with Dr. Susan Bookheimer and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. His research focuses on multimodal neuroimaging of human episodic memory systems in health and neurodegeneration. Currently, he uses DTI and fMRI to study connectivity between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in normal individuals and those at greater genetic risk for developing Alzheimer’s Disease.
Jesse holds a BA in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley. He previously worked at The Scripps Research Institute as a technician for Dr. Francisco Asturias, where he used transimission electron microscopy and computational reconstruction methods to determine high resolution 3D structures of protein complexes.
John Colby
Biography:
John is currently a 5th year MD/PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at UCLA. He received his B.S. in Bioengineering from UC San Diego, where he worked in a cardiac biomechanics laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to develop and lead an international collaboration between these institutions and a high-performance computing group at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
After graduating, John worked as an algorithms engineer at Science Applications International Corp. on a DARPA anti-bioterrorism initiative to design a novel biosensor for environmental and epidemiological surveillance.
John is currently doing his dissertation research at UCLA in the Developmental Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Sowell, Ph.D.. His broad research goals are focused at the interplay of science, engineering, and medicine, and the positive synergism that can result from their interaction. His present work involves the development of novel tractography analysis strategies, their application towards the study of brain development in both health and disease, and a particular focus on the relationship between frontal white matter connectivity and advances in executive functioning in the context of fetal alcohol exposure.
Catherine Davey
Biography:
Catherine is currently a final year Ph.D. student, working under the direction of Dr Leigh Johnston and Dr David Grayden, in the Howard Florey Institute. She received her B. Eng from the University of Western Australia, where she completed her honours thesis in computer vision. She then worked for the Ford Motor Company as a diagnostic engineer, prior to starting her Ph.D. with the University of Melbourne.
She is currently working in fMRI connectivity, assessing the potential of preprocessing to induce connectivity, unifying linear connectivity techniques into a single framework, and developing a noise model for BOLD data.
Click here to download Catherine’s Poster: Filtering induces correlation in fMRI resting state data
Emily Dennis
Biography:
Emily is currently a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Neuroscience Program and will be completing her dissertation work under Dr. Paul Thompson in the Laboratory for Neuro Imaging. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington where she completed a neuroimaging thesis on sex differences in dyslexia. As an undergraduate she worked two summers with Dr. Fumiko Hoeft at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. Following graduation she joined Dr. Ian Gotlib’s Mood and Anxiety Disorders Laboratory at Stanford University where she worked for two years. Her primary interest within neuroimaging is resting-state connectivity and intends to do her dissertation work on the genetic, developmental, and cognitive correlates of neural networks, particularly the executive control network.
Click here to download Emily’s Poster: Time Projection and the Executive Control Network
Andreea Diaconescu
Biography:
Andreea Diaconescu is a graduate student with Dr. Randy McIntosh at the Rotman Research Institute; Baycrest Center affiliated with University of Toronto. Andreea obtained her B.Sc. at York University where she studied how learning shapes face perception under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Wilson. Andreea continued her research training with Dr. Randy McIntosh during her Master’s and now her Doctorate studies. During her graduate training at the Rotman Research Institute, Andreea has collaborated with other researchers worldwide on a variety of neuroimaging and neuropharmacology projects, investigating various topics such as reward learning, schizophrenia, and multisensory perception. She obtained in-depth expertise in experimental design and multivariate statistical analysis methods using various neuroimaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Her work is currently focused on studying age-related changes in multisensory integration, and how multisensory stimulation facilitates sensorimotor speed and accuracy in older adults.
Gaolong Gong
Biography:
Dr. Gong is working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain Imaging Center (BIC) of Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) under the supervision of Professor Alan C Evans. He is from China and got his PhD degree in Pattern Recognition and Complex System from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in May 2006.
After PhD graduation, Dr. Gong started his postdoctoral training at University of Alberta under the supervision of Professor Christian Beaulieu and Professor Donald Gross. During this period, he was focusing on brain connectivity in temporal lobe epilepsy using diffusion tensor imaging.
In July 2008, Dr. Gong moved to MNI continuing his postdoctoral training. He is currently using computational MRI techniques to characterize the human brain as a complex network and further reveal its dynamics associated with development, aging and brain disorders.
Rachel Gonzales
Biography:
Rachael is a graduate student in Cell and Molecular Biology specializing in Neuroscience at the University of Hawai’i. She is working as a Graduate Assistant in the Neuroscience and MRI Research laboratory of Drs. Linda Chang and Thomas Ernst at Queen’s Medical Center. She is responsible for subject MRI analysis using Diffusion Tensor Imaging techniques, such as Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping.
Neda Jahanshad
Biography:
I am currently a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering in the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA working under the direction of Dr. Paul Thompson. My primary research focus is on combining neuroimaging techniques and genetic data to map and discover developmental and disease related genetic influences on white matter integrity and connectivity through the use of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and high angular resolution diffusion tensor imaging (HARDI).
Budhachandra Khundrakpam
Biography:
I am Budhachandra Singh Khundrakpam, a Post Doctoral Fellow with Dr. Alan Evans. I am looking at the developmental changes in structural brain networks of normally growing children using tools from Complex Systems.
I have done my PhD in Neuroscience in which I worked on Tensor Reconstruction algorithms and DTI. Even though I have background in Physics, my 5 years of PhD at the National Brain Research Centre, India exposed me to all aspects of neuroscience, from cellular to systems level to computational and imaging. This is when I became intrigued on how unique our brain is.
I have always been interested in the intricate brain dynamics; specifically how structural and functional brain interactions lead to the complex human brain. To this end, I follow papers, techniques which can be used to infer information about the structural and functional brain dynamics. One such approach is the Complex Systems theory which has been vastly used in many fields including neuroscience. I am currently looking at the temporal dynamics of structural brain networks of children using morphological descriptors namely surface area and cortical thickness using tools from complex systems theory.
Danielle King
Biography:
Danielle King is a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Neuroscience program in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Danielle received her B.A. in Psychology from Skidmore College in 2007. Since then, she has been studying under the supervision of Dr. Michael Miller at UCSB. Using both functional MRI as well as patient studies, Danielle has been investigating the neural mechanisms underlying episodic encoding and retrieval. Specifically, using both an individual differences approach, as well as group averaging, she has sought to explore how differences in brain activity and organization can account for normal variation in memory ability. Among other advancements, her work has lead to valuable insight regarding the role of the parietal cortex in episodic recollection. Her work has been presented at numerous conferences domestically and internationally, including the recent Organization for Human Brain Mapping Meeting in Barcelona, Spain, as well as the Bay Area Memory Meeting in Palo Alto, California.
Agatha Lenartowicz
Biography:
Attention is what determines the contents of our mind. Self-control is our ability to resist an automatic behavior and do “something else”. My research aims to understand how – in terms of brain processes – attention mediates, modulates and interferes with self-control. My aim is to understand the dynamics (time and space) of the neural interactions that underlie these processes. To this end I combine multi-modal neuroimaging technology (e.g., EEG, fMRI) with multivariate analytical techniques. To address these questions I am collaborating with Mark S. Cohen and Sandra Loo, working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior at UCLA. I obtained my PhD in Psychology & Neuroscience, with emphasis on context effects in cognitive control, working under the guidance of Jonathan Cohen, at Princeton University.
John Lewis
Biography:
Dr. Lewis is a postdoctoral research fellow in the McConnell Brain Imaging Center at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Lewis’ research focuses on how large-scale brain connectivity changes over development, and how brain size influences those changes, particularly in abnormal development. His dissertation, entitled “Size always matters: An investigation of the influence of connection length on the organization of white-matter in typical development and in autism” hypothesized that differences in brain size during development will result in differences in conduction delays and metabolic costs for long-distance connections, and that this will impact the retention of long- versus short-distance connectivity during developmental axonal pruning. His research explores this hypothesis with computational modeling, EEG, and structural and diffusion MRI.
Working with colleagues at the MNI and elsewhere, he is currently studying the relation between connection length and changes in connectivity in longitudinal data from typically developing children, as well as between brain overgrowth and abnormal changes in connectivity in children with autism, and the infant siblings of children with autism.
Sarah Madsen
Biography:
Sarah Madsen received her B.S. in neuroscience and psychobiology at UCLA in 2007. After working as a research assistant in the Laboratory for Neuro Imaging for two years, she began graduate school with the UCLA Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program in the fall of 2009. Her current work with Dr. Paul Thompson focuses on Alzheimer’s disease and aging in the human brain, using MRI, PET, and DTI to track brain changes in relation to clinical measures such as cardiovascular health and other biomarkers such as amyloid and plaque accumulation. With Dr. Jamie Feusner, Sarah will be working on BOLD and DTI connectivity in individuals with Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a disorder with obsessive-compulsive and anxious features that is characterized by a preoccupation with perceived defects in physical appearance. Additionally, Sarah is very interested in science outreach and education and will be leading Project Brainstorm at UCLA in the upcoming year. Her graduate studies are being supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.
Sam Torrisi
Biography:
Salvatore (Sam) Torrisi is currently a 3rd year doctoral candidate in the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program at UCLA. He uses fMRI to look at the connectivity of emotion regulation in bipolar disorder. In 2003 he received an M.F.A. in computer music composition at California Institute of the Arts and in 2007 an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at UCLA.
Shivakumar Viswanthan
Biography:
Shivakumar Viswanathan is a postdoctoral scholar working working in the lab of Dr. Scott T. Grafton at the Department of Psychology, University of California-Santa Barbara. His research interests are in understanding how the brain covertly simulates motor behavior in varied scenarios such as action observation, motor imagery, imitation, and movement planning. Another research focus is to understand Repetition Suppression and the effects of stimulus-similarity on response selection. Before moving to UCSB, he trained as a postdoctoral scholar studying stimulus-similarity effects in recognition and binding in visual working memory under Dr. Robert Sekuler at Brandeis University.
Shivakumar entered neuroscience with a background in artificial intelligence methods. He completed his B.Engr (Mechanical) at the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (Nagpur, India). This was followed by an MS (Engr Mgmt) at the University of Missouri-Rolla, where his research was on developing Artificial Intelligence methods for the automated design of appliances to achieve environmentally conscious design goals. He pursued his interest in Artificial Intelligence and got his PhD (Computer Science) at Brandeis University studying evolution-inspired algorithms for machine learning (advised by Dr. Jordan Pollack).