Our Mission

Our lab focuses on identifying the neuroanatomical substrate for symptoms common in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions with a goal of direct translation into possible targets for noninvasive treatment modalities, e.g., TMS and/or fMRI-based neurofeedback.

This entails three interactive research arms:

  1. Generation of circuit-based hypotheses for specific symptoms from cohorts with lesions, tubers, tumor resections, etc.

  2. Validation of these localizations through prospective neuroimaging study of patients with neurodevelopmental disorders with similar symptoms, and

  3. Testing whether this circuit can be modulated through non-invasive therapy, e.g., behavioral, fMRI-neurofeedback, or potentially TMS-based interventions.

Projects

  • This project seeks to understand whether there are particular networks of regions impacted by lesions that are associated with particular symptoms that are also seen in Autism Spectrum Disorders. We have begun several projects to help answer this question, starting with the symptom of face processing difficulties:

    1. Studying Face Processing in children with Tuberous Sclerosis Complex:
      • This study investigates whether the pattern of cortical tubers in children with Tuberous Sclerosis Complex predicts their face processing ability. If this is true, it would indicate which networks are causally involved in face processing difficulties.

    2. Studying Face Processing in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder:
      • This study investigates whether face processing difficulties in adolescents with ASD is correlated with specific brain network differences, a hypothesis generated from patients with acquired prosopagnosia, i.e., face blindness after brain injury. If this is true, it would mean that the same brain regions are causally involved in face processing difficulties in patients without brain injury.

    3. Studying the correlation between Face Processing and Social Affect:
      • This study leverages large-scale existing datasets to quantify the relationship between face recognition ability and social affect.

Moving forward, we have already started to investigate additional symptoms and are happy to collaborate with researchers interested in applying lesion network mapping to their data.

Generating Developmental Atlases of Brain Connectivity (2018 - present)

  • This project utilizes publicly available brain connectivity data, currently from more than 20,000 children and adolescents, into single consistently processed and quality-controlled datasets that can be used by medical researchers as a ‘gold-standard’ reference of typical development.

    1. The GSP1000 Processed Connectome is derived from data acquired by the Brain Genomics Superstruct Project (GSP), which contained 1570 subjects in total (ages 18-36). From this dataset, 1000 subjects (1:1 M/F) were chosen and processed using publicly available tools to generate a normative functional connectivity dataset. Click this link to download:‘https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/ILXIKS'

Participate

Studies Seeking Participants:

Meet the Team

Faculty

Avatar

Alexander Cohen, MD, PhD

Principal Investigator

The Brain, Playing Sitar

Avatar

Jurriaan M. Peters, MD, PhD

Investigator

Epilepsy, Triathlon

Researchers

Avatar

Gillian Miller, BA

Clinical Research Specialist

Knitting, Crochet, Cats

Avatar

Clara Steeby, BS

Clinical Research Specialist

Reading fiction, Baking, Silk screen printing

Avatar

Jiaqi Zhao, BS

Clinical Research Assistant

Pet Blogging, Movies, Playing Piano

Avatar

Zexia Lu, MS, BA

Clinical Research Assistant

Movies, Ski

Avatar

Meghan Walsh, BA

Clinical Research Assistant

Skateboarding, Dogs

Avatar

Wendy Xiao Herman, MD, PhD

Child Neurology Resident

Travel, Food

Avatar

Shaoling Peng, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Travel, Cooking, Running

Avatar

Nasim Sheikhi

Co-Op Student

Traveling, Crocheting, Pets

Avatar

Shreya Tripathy, BA

Medical Student

Cooking, Traveling, Watching movies

Alumni

Avatar

Arina Ovchinnikova

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Avatar

Ayesha Imran

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Avatar

Brechtje Mulder

Medical Student

Avatar

Chariton Moschopoulos

Child Neurology Resident

Avatar

Eva Leikikh

High School Research Intern

Avatar

Faiza Yasin

Undergraduate COACH Intern

Avatar

Ivry Zagurly-Orly

Medical Student

Avatar

Louis Soussand

Data Scientist

Avatar

Keturah Warner

Undergraduate COACH Intern

Avatar

Mallory Kroeck

Research Specialist

Avatar

Pauline Brandon Bravo Bruinsma

Graduate Research Intern

Avatar

Peter McManus

Clinical Research Assistant

Avatar

Roshan Mathur

Undergraduate Research Intern

Avatar

Tabitha Hacker

Clinical Research Assistant

Avatar

Alyssa Edwards

Medical Student

Avatar

Juliana Wall

Clinical Research Assistant

Avatar

Meera Basu

Neurology Resident

Recent Publications

(Draft List, refer to Google Scholar)

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2021). Tuber Locations Associated with Infantile Spasms Map to a Common Brain Network. ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY.

(2020). Mapping migraine to a common brain network. Brain.

(2020). Cortical lesions causing loss of consciousness are anticorrelated with the dorsal brainstem. Human Brain Mapping.

(2019). Tubers Associated with Infantile Spasms Impact a Common Brain Network in Tuberous Sclerosis Complex. ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY.

Educational Resources

Quick tutorials for scientific computing

Learn to use Markdown to make ‘modern’ text files (10 minutes):

The ‘command line’ and writing shell scripts (~1 hour each):

An introduction to pandas (an alternative to excel):

An introduction to R (an alternative to SPSS/STATA):

Jupyter Notebooks, a great way to organize your python, matlab, and R code:

Git, a way to keep track of versions of your code and share files:

Good articles to read:

Introduction to MRI-fMRI

Useful Courses (free):

Contact