Speakers
Turhan Canli, PhD NY, USA
E-mail: turhan.canli@sunysb.edu
Dr. Canli was educated at Tufts (B.A., 1988) and Yale (Ph.D.,
Biopsychology, 1993), and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale and Stanford University. In 2001, he joined the Psychology faculty of Stony Brook University. He is also a member of the Stony Brook Graduate program in Genetics, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Wurzburg, Germany. His research is concerned with the biology of personality, emotion, memory, and individual differences. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic brain stimulation, and molecular genetic techniques, Dr. Canli investigates how and why we differ from each other in our responses to emotional experiences. He recently edited a book on the “Biology of Personality”.
2006_Canli_PNAS_Epigenesis.pdf (899.29 KB)
Carrie E. Bearden, PhD LA, USA
E-mail: cbearden@mednet.ucla.edu
Carrie E. Bearden is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and a faculty member in both the Centers for Cognitive Neuroscience and Neurobehavioral Genetics at UCLA. Dr. Bearden received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, and conducted post-doctoral research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia on the neurobehavioral phenotype of a specific genetic condition, Chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. Dr. Bearden’s research aims to understand genetic influences on brain structure in the development of psychosis, using converging methods to study cognition and neuroanatomy in clinical high-risk samples (adolescents at ultra high-risk for psychosis), and in possible ‘genetic subtypes’ of the disease with very high penetrance (i.e., 22q11.2 microdeletions). Most recently, she received an NIMH grant to examine neural endophenotypes of bipolar disorder in a genetically isolated population in Latin America.
inpress_Bearden_HBM_GenomicImaging.pdf (1.2 MB)
Ian J. Deary, PhD
E-mail: I.Deary@ed.ac.uk
Ian Deary is Professor of Differential Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. He graduated in Psychology and Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and studied there for his PhD. He practised psychiatry in London and Edinburgh before moving to academic psychology. His principal research interest is human mental abilities, especially the origins of cognitive differences and the effects of ageing and medical conditions on mental skills. Professor Deary has published over 300 refereed journal articles, three authored books and three edited books. He holds a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2003-2007) for his work on human cognitive ageing. In 2006 he was joint winner, with John Starr and Lawrence Whalley, of the Tenovus Scotland Margaret MacLellan award for “the best research on the brain in Scotland in recent years.”
2006_Deary_EurJHumGenet_GeneticsIQ.pdf (134.27 KB)
Sarah Durston PhD Utrecht, The Netherlands
E-mail: S.Durston@umcutrecht.nl
Sarah Durston is an associate professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht and the head of the Neuroimaging Lab in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Her research focuses on investigating typical and atypical brain development, using neuroimaging approaches. She is particularly interested in the pathway from genetic susceptibility for neuropsychiatric disorders to associated behavioural deficits. Recent work includes studies of familial influences on brain structure and function in ADHD, as well as investigations of the effects of risk genes.
2006_Durston_BiolPsych_PFC_ADHD_genetics.pdf (1002.4 KB)
Jin Fan, PhD NY, USA
E-mail: jin.fan@mssm.edu
Dr. Fan and colleagues have conducted a series of studies on human attentional networks. An Attention Network Test (ANT) was developed to provide a behavioral measure of the efficiency of the three attentional networks of alerting, orienting, and executive control. Behavioral, developmental, patient, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event related potentials (ERP), and genetics studies were conducted to investigate the anatomy, circuitry, pathology, and development of these networks. It was shown that the executive control network is highly heritable. Performance in resolving conflict relates to two dopamine genes. Subsequent imaging-genetic studies on a smaller genetically defined cohort showed that specific variants of the MAOA and DRD4 genes contribute to individual differences in functional activation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and other brain areas.
2003_Fan_PNAS_Genetics&ExecutiveFunct&BrainActivity.pdf (227.46 KB)
Simon E. Fisher, DPhil Oxford, UK
E-mail: simon.fisher@well.ox.ac.uk
Simon Fisher is head of Molecular Neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG), Oxford University, UK. After completing a DPhil on identification of human disease genes in 1996, he spent 6 years as senior postdoctoral scientist in Prof. Anthony Monaco’s group at the WTCHG. During this time he carried out genome-wide scans for dyslexia, language impairments, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and handedness, and discovered the first case of a gene mutated in a speech and language disorder, FOXP2. In 2002, Dr. Fisher set up his own laboratory and now uses state-of-the-art techniques to explore how language-related genes influence brain development at multiple levels - molecular, cellular, developmental, anatomical and behavioural. Dr. Fisher has authored 50 journal articles and 4 book chapters. In 2005, he was “Highly Commended” in the Young Researcher of the Year category at the Times Higher Awards.
2006_Fisher_NatRevGenet_languagegenes.pdf (429.65 KB)
Richard Haier, PhD Irvine, USA
E-mail: rjhaier@uci.edu
Richard J. Haier is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine (School of Medicine). He received a PhD in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1975. For 20 years, his research has used structural and functional brain imaging to study the neural underpinnings of individual differences in human intelligence. His recent papers use voxel-based morphometry to determine the relationships between brain structure variation and intelligence. Surprisingly, these areas may differ in men and women. In a recent review of all neuroimaging studies of intelligence, he reported converging evidence that the neural basis of intelligence is distributed across the brain with special emphasis on parietal and frontal areas.
2005_Haier_NeuroImage_SexdiffIQ.pdf (258.54 KB)
James J. Hudziak, MD Burlington, USA
E-mail: James.Hudziak@uvm.edu
James J. Hudziak, M.D. is Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Medicine and Pediatrics. He is director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as well as the Behavioral Genetics Division. In addition to his appointments at UVM, he is an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH and Professor of Genetics of Childhood Behavior Problems at the VU University of The Netherlands. He is currently the President of the American Psychopathological Association (APPA), a sitting member of an NIMH study section and serves on the ABPN RRC in Psychiatry. In 2006 he was elected as Chairman of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation, Wilmette, IL. He is the Co-Chair of Research for the Society of Professors in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the U.S. He holds NIMH grants for his research in genetic epidemiology of childhood disorders, including phenotypic, endophenotypic, and molecular genetic studies of child psychopathology. His research efforts have involved the study of genetic factors including social behaviors, obsessive-compulsive, attention, and aggressive behavior in boys and girls. He participated as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s committee on the importance of research training in psychiatry residency and is actively involved in developing new methods to train psychiatrists in genomic medicine.
2005_Hudziak_AmJPsychiatry_Genetics_ADHD.pdf (145.45 KB)
Hilleke Hulshoff Pol, PhD Utrecht, The Netherlands
E-mail: h.e.hulshoff@azu.nl
Hilleke Hulshoff Pol is head of the Neuroimaging section at the Department of Psychiaty at the University Medical Center Utrecht. With her reseach group she studies the dynamics of human brain structure in health and in psychiatric diseases, particularly schizophrenia, using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The influences of genes and environmental factors upon changes in human brain structure are studied longitudinally in healthy twin-pairs and in twin-pairs concordant and discordant for psychiatric diseases. She wants to explore (patho-) physiological substrates underlying the volumetric brain changes. For this purpose her research focusses on functional neural networks during development and abberant neural networks in psychiatric diseases using MRI at higher field, including diffusion tensor imaging.
2006_HulshofPol_JNeurosci_h2_Voxels.pdf (399.68 KB)
Venkata S. (Anand) Mattay, MD Bethesda, USA
E-mail: vsm@mail.nih.gov
Dr. Mattay is Clinical Director of the Neuroimaging Core Facility at the Genes, Cognition and Psychosis Program, NIMH, NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. He is board certified in both Neurology and Nuclear Medicine. Following a two-year fellowship in Functional Neuroimaging in the Laboratory of Diagnostic Radiology Research at the NIH, Dr. Mattay joined the NIMH as a Staff Clinician and clinical imaging scientist. Dr. Mattay is interested in studying individual gene effects on brain information processing using fMRI in normal volunteers across the aging cycle and in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. His Unit is also exploring the utility of functional brain imaging in pharmacogenomics.
2004_Mattay_CurrOpinBiol_ImagingGenetics.pdf (310.94 KB)
Ger J.A. Ramakers, PhD Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: g.ramakers@nin.knaw.nl
Ger Ramakers studied neurobiology at the University of Utrecht and more recently developmental psychology at the University of Amsterdam. He is interested in the cellular mechanisms by which genes and environment are able to interact and give rise to cognition. His lab studies the role of mental retardation genes, i.e., genes with a proven causal role in cognition, in neuronal network formation, function and cognition. Studies are performed on humans with genetic causes of mental retardation, knock-out mice in which the same genes are deleted and cultured neuronal networks. Work is guided by the network hypothesis of mental retardation, which states that all forms of mental retardation are primarily caused by abnormal structural neuronal connectivity, which subsequently leads to deficient information processing.
2002_Ramakers_TIN_Rho_protiens.pdf (550.33 KB)
Bart Rypma, PhD Texas, USA
E-mail: bart.rypma@utd.edu
Dr. Rypma’s research is aimed at exploring the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms of human working memory and how those mechanisms are affected by aging and disease. He uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe the activity of younger and older adults as they perform cognitive tasks. fMRI is still a relatively new method for studying brain activity and much work remains to be done to perfect it, especially when comparing different populations like young and old. Thus, one focus of Dr. Rypma’s work has been the development of fMRI experimental methods to facilitate cross-population comparisons of neural activity.
2006_Rypma_Neurosci_WM_PFC.pdf (390.56 KB)
Paul Thompson, PhD LA, USA
E-mail: thompson@loni.ucla.edu
Paul Thompson is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the UCLA School of Medicine. His research team of 13 mathematicians and neuroscientists develops new methods for analyzing brain images. Collaborating with over 40 imaging centers worldwide, Dr. Thompson’s group has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles analyzing brain changes in development, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, in HIV/AIDS patients and methamphetamine users, and in genetic disorders of brain development (Fragile X, Williams syndrome). His group recently reported the first time-lapse maps of cortical development in childhood and of deterioration in Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia, based on large databases of brain scans. Newer projects examine genetic influences on brain structure in twins (with MRI and DTI), and genetic and treatment effects on disease progression in schizophrenia and dementia, in clinical trials and with ultra-high-field scanning (7 Tesla MRI).
Thompson_Nature_Neuro2001_genetics.pdf (1.13 MB)
Richard D. Todd, PhD, MD St Louis, USA
E-mail: toddr@psychiatry.wustl.edu
Dr. Todd’s research interests focus on the genetic epidemiology of early onset psychopathology using population based samples of young twins and large sibships. His most recent published studies include the definition, heritability and course of autistic spectrum disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-complusive disorder and mood disorders. Work in progress includes genetic epidemiological approaches coupled with large scale genotyping for alcoholism, mutation screening approaches coupled to structural brain imaging studies for ADHD and early onset depression and G x E studies of ADHD and early onset depression.
2006_Todd_BiolPsych_Autism_familial.pdf (240.26 KB)
Miranda van Turennout, PhD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: miranda.vanturennout@fcdonders.kun.nl
Miranda van Turennout is a principal investigator at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at the University of Nijmegen. She is heading a research group on “Learning and plasticity”. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, this group studies the principles of neural plasticity in relation to learning-induced changes in cognitive functions. Does learning recruit more brain tissue as it learns, or less brain tissue as specific acts become more precise, or different brain areas as a task becomes more highly practiced, and automatic? Research topics include neural mechanisms mediating the formation of visual and conceptual categories, the neural basis of route learning, and learning-induced changes in the neural representation of language In addition to the adult brain, she has recently strated to investigate language learning and plasticity in the developing brain, that is, in children.
2004_Janzen_MvT_NN.pdf (545.84 KB)