Month: December 2018

UConn BIRC Trailblazer Award Announced

Posted on by

Issue Date

December 19, 2018

Background

Since the opening of the University of Connecticut (UConn) Brain Imaging Research Center (BIRC) in June 2015, there has been an increase and diversification of user-base, neuroimaging-related extramural grants, and neuroimaging expertise of students and faculty. However, there is still room for greater utilization of BIRC, which presents opportunities for BIRC to offer the resources to perform high-profile and neuroimaging-intensive research that other fully occupied imaging centers cannot offer.

Objective

The BIRC Trailblazer Award was created to allow research teams to perform cutting-edge research and/or perform research that will benefit the BIRC community at-large. The objective of the 2019 BIRC Trailblazer Award is to fund: (1) high-risk high-reward projects with exceptional innovation that lead to raising the visibility of UConn, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) and BIRC; and/or (2) projects that will benefit the BIRC community at-large (e.g. methods development). The project is intended to lead to high-profile peer-review publications, release of a public database, and/or work that is cited and utilized by large-number of UConn researchers in their grants and manuscripts. The project should also lead to large-scale and high-profile extramural grant applications shortly after the end of the funding period.

 

Talk: Clinical Translation of Resting State Networks

Posted on by

Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, PhD

Northeastern University and MIT

Distinguished Speaker

Wednesday, January 30 2019 3:30-5:00PM Bousfield A106

Abstract: Psychiatric neuroimaging has been based primarily on group inferences, but this research has not fundamentally altered patient diagnosis or treatment. The future quality of healthcare in psychiatry will benefit from a timely translation of basic research findings into more effective and efficient patient care. I will describe ways in which the intrinsic functional architecture of the human brain, as elucidated by resting state networks (RSNs), can provide neuro-markers supporting 1) early identification of individuals at risk for mental health difficulties, so that perventive treatment can reduce or even avert future difficulties, 2) neuroprediction, aimed at personalized or precision medicine targeted for selection of an optimal treatment program, and 3) cutting-edge, noninvasive, behavioral interventions such as mindfulness based real-time fMRI neurofeedback, used to augment current available treatments and limit the progression of psychiatric disorders.

Bio: Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli is a Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) Imaging Center at Northeastern University with affiliation also at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Her primary mission is to understand the brain basis of psychiatric disorders and to promote the translation of this knowledge into clinical practice. Towards this end, she employs multimodal neuroimaging techniques to investigate the pathophysiology of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia. Her goals are to discover biomarkers for improved diagnosis, early detection (potentiating early intervention and possibly prevention), prediction of the therapeutic response (targeted towards precision medicine), and development of novel therapeutic techniques (e.g., real-time fMRI neurofeedback) with the hope of improving (or augmenting) currently available treatments. A secondary goal of her research is to develop functional imaging analysis tools to share with clinicians and the neuroimaging community at large.

Visitors from UCHC are encouraged to use the UCHC-Storrs shuttle service. Talks can also be joined remotely. Please contact us if you are interested in meeting with the speaker.