Applying computational modelling to clinical neuroscience

Dr Danielle Bassett, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Danielle S. Bassett is the Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She is most well-known for her work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. She received a B.S. in physics from the Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. In 2012, she was named American Psychological Association's `Rising Star' and given an Alumni Achievement Award from the Schreyer Honors College at Pennsylvania State University for extraordinary achievement under the age of 35. In 2014, she was named an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow and received the MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant. In 2015, she received the IEEE EMBS Early Academic Achievement Award, and was named an ONR Young Investigator. She is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania. She lives with her husband and two sons in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

Dr Nicholas Schiff, Cornell University, USA

Dr Nicholas Schiff is a physician-scientist with an internationally recognized expertise in neurological disorders of consciousness. He is The Jerold B. Katz Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Schiff’s research efforts bridge basic neuroscience and clinical investigative studies of the pathophysiology of impaired consciousness using state-of-the art neuroimaging and neurophysiological measurements. This research program has provided several landmark contributions to the understanding of cerebral activity in severely brain injured-patients. Most notably, Dr Schiff and colleagues have taken insights into the neurophysiological mechanisms of arousal regulation and of deep brain electrical stimulation techniques to demonstrate evidence that long-lasting, severe cognitive disability may be influenced by electrical stimulation of the central thalamus. Based on extensive and long-range longitudinal human subject studies of recovery of consciousness, Dr Schiff has formulated a testable hypothesis for the contribution of the anterior forebrain mesocircuit to recovery of consciousness that organizes the findings from work in central thalamic deep brain stimulation into a wider context. This work is an important foundation for developing further understanding of both the mechanisms of recovery of consciousness and basic mechanisms underlying consciousness in the human brain. Dr Schiff is an elected member of the American Neurological Association and the recipient of several awards, including the 2007 Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience. Dr Schiff's research is currently supported by the US President’s BRAIN Initiative, NIH-NINDS, The Jerold B. Katz Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Past support has included NIH-NICHD, NEI-NIDDR, NIH-NIMH, Swartz Foundation, Lounsbery Foundation, Charles A. Dana Foundation, and IntElect Medical, Inc.

Professor Gustavo Deco, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Gustavo Deco is ICREA Research Professor and Full Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he heads the Computational Neuroscience Group and directs the Center for Brain and Cognition.

He studied Physics at the National University of Rosario. In 1987, he received his PhD in Physics for his thesis on Relativistic Atomic Collisions. In 1997, he obtained his habilitation (maximal academical degree in Germany) in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich for his thesis on Neural Learning. In 2001, he received his PhD in Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich for his thesis on Visual Attention.

His research interests include computational neuroscience, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, biological networks, statistical formulation of neural networks, and chaos theory. He has actively contributed to the modelling and integration of experimental measurements through theoretical frameworks, and collaborates with many experimentalists to confront theory and experiments. Recognised as a world leader in computational neuroscience, he has led pioneering work in dynamical modelling of human brain activity. He is an ERC Advanced grantee and member of the Human Brain Project.

Professor Felix Schurmann, Ecole Polytechnique Fédér ale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Felix Schürmann is adjunct professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, co-director of the Blue Brain Project and involved in several research challenges of the European Human Brain Project. He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, supported by the German National Academic Foundation. Later, as a Fulbright Scholar, he obtained his Master's degree (M.S.) in Physics from the State University of New York, Buffalo, USA, under the supervision of Richard Gonsalves. During these studies, he became curious about the role of different computing substrates and dedicated his master thesis to the simulation of quantum computing. He studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, under the supervision of Karlheinz Meier. For his thesis he co-designed an efficient implementation of a neural network in hardware.

Professor Claus Hilgetag, University of Hamburg, Germany

Hilgetag studied Biophysics in Berlin and Neuroscience in Edinburgh, Oxford, Newcastle and Boston.  He is interested in fundamental principles of the organization of brain architecture, connectivity, and dynamics.  In particular, his group investigates structural factors that are predictive of anatomical connections in the brain, and explores relations between topological features of neural connectivity, such as modules and hubs, and patterns of brain activity.  He also develops methods for inferring brain functions from the impact of brain lesions.

Dr Ana Solodkin, UC Irvine School of Medicine, USA

Dr. Solodkin’s research interest has been centered from the beginning, around brain plasticity. During her Ph.D. at the "Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute" (Mexico) and NIH (Mentored by Dr. P Rudomin and Dr. MA Ruda) she focused on long-term plasticity in the developing spinal cord. Later on at the University of Iowa she joined the Cognitive Neurology group under the direction of Dr. A. Damasio receiving direct training with Dr. GW van Hoesen in human neuroanatomy. Her active and long-term research has targeted the relationship between basic neurobiology and cognitive neurology where using network analyses, she has focused on disease biomarkers on AD, stroke and spinocerebellar ataxias. Dr. Solodkin’s aim with this work has been to discover anatomical and physiological substrates of disease that have a reasonable likelihood of leading to therapeutic interventions. In this context, Dr. Solodkin joined Dr. McIntosh in 2006 at the early stages of the development of The Virtual Brain. Currently Dr. Solodkin utilizes The Virtual Brain platform to determine changes in brain dynamics as they relate to stroke. These efforts, in collaboration with Dr. McIntosh and Dr. Jirsa are providing a first glimpse on basic neural mechanisms associated with brain dynamics specifically related to long-term recovery.

Dr Maurizio Corbetta, Washington University, USA

Dr. Maurizio Corbetta is the Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology, and Professor of Radiology, Anatomy and Neurobiology, and Bioengineering at Washington University School of Medicine. He is the Chief of the Division of Neuro-Rehabilitation, and Director of Neurological Rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis.  As of 2016 Dr. Corbetta will be the Chair of Neurology in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Padua, Italy. Dr. Corbetta has pioneered experiments on the neural mechanisms of human attention with Positron Emission Tomography (PET).  He has discovered two brain networks dedicated to attention control, the dorsal and ventral attention networks, and developed, in collaboration with Dr. Gordon Shulman, a brain model of attention that has been cited in the literature more than 5,000 times.  His clinical work has focused on the physiological correlates of focal injury.  He has developed a pathogenetic model of the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.  He is currently developing novel methods for studying the functional organization of the brain using functional connectivity MRI, magneto-encephalography (MEG), and electro-corticography (EcoG).  He is also working on the effects of focal injuries on the network organization of brain systems with an eye to neuromodulation.

Professor Cathy Price, University College London, UK

Cathy Price is an expert in the use of structural and functional brain imaging for understanding cognitive processing in the neurologically healthy and damaged brain. Her basic training was in Physiology and Psychology and she has a PhD in cognitive neuropsychology. Since 1997, she has been funded by the Wellcome Trust to build a functional anatomical model of auditory and visual word processing that will predict language outcome after brain damage. In parallel, she is developing data-led approaches that provide probabilistic lesion-symptom mapping associations. Her goal is to develop a clinical tool that uses lesion site to predict the most likely outcome and recovery of language abilities after stroke.