Research People and Projects

The fundamental organization of large-scale human brain networks, with a particular focus on higher-level cognition and the intersection of emotion and cognition. Search for specific network-level signatures, or “fingerprints”, that co-vary with heritable behavioral variation in the general population and mark vulnerability for psychiatric illness onset. Current projects encompass three domains of inquiry which aim to (1) characterize the organization of functional and anatomical brain networks; (2) establish reliable links between genetic variation, system-level brain function, and behavior in the general population; and (3) explore associations between disturbances in network organization and clinical presentation in psychiatric illness. Recent work integrates whole-brain transcriptional data from human and non-human primates with estimates of in vivo brain function to link phenomena across levels, from genes and molecules through cells, circuits, networks, and behavior, providing the opportunity to improve our understanding of the relations between brain systems, illness risk, and clinical course.