Abstract: One of the longstanding goals of brain imaging is the development of "brain growth charts" to provide reference norms for measurements from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analogous to pediatric growth charts for height and weight. Brain charts could enable brain morphological measures from an individual MRI scan, such as cortical thickness or regional gray matter volume, to be placed on a continuous dimension of brain deviation from typical developmental trajectories. Analogously, one of the longstanding goals of psychiatric genetics is the development of genetic risk scores to identify youth with common or rare genetic variants at risk for neurodevelopmental psychiatric conditions such as autism or schizophrenia. The ambitious goal of widely adopted normative models with practical clinical impact has not yet been achieved -- either in brain imaging or in genomics – partly due to difficulty in amassing multi-site data, quality control, and statistical modeling challenges. This seminar will discuss our recent work, along with international consortia, focused on the development of genomic and neuroimaging normative models, including  brain charts generated from over 100,000 MRI scans across the human life cycle. The resulting models provide standardized and interpretable measure of deviation that are sensitive to differences in neuropsychiatric conditions and to interindividual variation in behavioral and cognitive outcomes in at-risk youth.

Bio: Aaron Alexander-Bloch, MPhil, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as the Director of the Brain-Gene-Development Lab.  He studied philosophy at Harvard College, then computational biology and neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Mental Health. He completed his medical training at UCLA followed by psychiatry residency at Yale. He is the recipient of multiple awards and federally funded grants for his research. At the Brain-Gene-Development Lab, Dr. Alexander-Bloch leads a multi-disciplinary team of computational scientists focused on the integration of brain imaging, genomics and clinical data to probe neurodevelopment and its disruption in mental illness.

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Note this event is being held in place of the ION Seminar Series time slot.  Please join us! 

Let us convene our annual:

ION DEI Town Hall meeting

Thursday February 16th at 4pm in the Knight Campus Beetham Seminar Room 

(Zoom option will be made available through ION listserv)

The agenda for the meeting will be:

1) Organizing our delegation to the annual SACNAS conference in Portland in October 2023, in coordination with a large effort from other Departments on campus.

2) Updates on current DEI efforts at ION.

3) Open mic to hear from the ION community about current issues and challenges, and suggestions for future efforts.

On behalf of the ION DEI committee,

Luca & Cris