Rowena Chin defended her dissertation and was awarded her PhD! We are so proud of you, Dr. Chin, and beyond excited to see what you do next. Check out Rowena’s work on her google scholar or twitter @ChinRowena Rowena does amazing work on aging and the brain. Some of her must-read papers include: Beyond cortex: The evolution of the human brain. (2023) R Chin, SWC Chang, AJ Holmes Psychological Review 130 (2), 285 Recognition of schizophrenia with regularized support vector machine and sequential region of interest selection using structural magnetic resonance imaging (2018) R Chin, AX You, F Meng, J Zhou, K Sim Scientific reports 8 (1), 13858

September 20, 2023 Sid Chopra, post-doc at the Holmes Lab, has a new paper out now in JAMA Psychiatry! This paper analyzes network-based spreading of grey matter changes across multiple stages of psychosis. Check it out here: www.doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.3293 In this case-control study of 534 participants from 4 independent samples spanning different stages of psychotic illness, it was found that gray matter alterations were constrained by the underlying architecture of the brain’s axonal pathways, and the hippocampus was consistently identified as a putative source from which volume loss may spread to connected regions. The paper was co-authored by Holmes lab post-doc Ashlea Segal, and post-doc Winnie Orchard also worked on the paper. Congrats, Sid, Ashlea and Winnie!  

We are excited to share that @AshleaSegal has joined the Holmes Lab as a @WuTsaiYale postdoc! We are so delighted to have you join us, Ashlea! Ashlea is a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr Nenad Sestan (Neuroscience, Yale University) and Dr Avram Holmes (Psychiatry, Rutgers University). Ashlea’s work aims to explore the neurobiological variability and consistency across individuals with common psychiatric illnesses. Welcome, Ashlea!

June 9th, 2023 Loïc Labache, Holmes Lab post-doc at Yale University, has just published a new paper in Nature Communications! This paper provides evidence that typical and atypical language lateralization is reflected throughout the functional architecture of the human brain. This work was published with Tian Ge (Massachusetts General Hospital), B. T. Thomas Yeo (National University of Singapore) and Avram Holmes (Yale University). Congratulations, Loïc! Check out the paper here: https://rdcu.be/dd8oG Follow Loïc and read more about his research here.  

Congrats to Jocelyn Ricard on being named a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and accepting a position as a Neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University! Jocelyn was a 2021-2023 Holmes Lab research assistant. We are so excited to see all the great things you will do at Stanford, Jocelyn. Jocelyn will be joining Stanford University’s PhD program in Neuroscience as a @KnightHennessy and @NASEMFordFellow. Read more about Jocelyn and her research here. About the Knight-Hennessy: Each year the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program selects 100 high-achieving students from around the world with demonstrated leadership and civic commitment to receive full funding to pursue a wide-ranging graduate education at Stanford, with the goal of developing a new generation of global leaders. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars is the largest fully endowed scholars program in the world. In addition to the opportunities that students will pursue through the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, they will have ample opportunity to build leadership skills specific to their discipline.

May 3, 2023 Elvisha Dhamala was awarded the Advancing Women in Science and Medicine Beth and Peter Hammack Career Development Award! Elvisha leads the Brain-Based Predictive Modeling (BPM) lab at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, NY. The lab’s research program is focused on characterizing neurobiological correlates of complex human behavior across healthy and clinical populations. We are especially interested in understanding how aspects of brain, behavior, and brain-behavior relationships differ between sexes and genders, and whether those differences underlie the unique presentations of psychiatric illnesses in males and females.   looking at the functional correlates of sex and gender. Read more about the BPM lab here and Elvisha’s work on her website.  

Elvisha Dhamala et al. discuss how individual differences in functional brain connectivity can be used to predict both the presence of psychiatric illness, and the extent to which disorder-relevant aspects of network connectivity are shared or unique across the sexes. Check it out today in Biological Psychiatry here!

Sid, Xihan, and Avram discuss recent findings from Pines et al. (2023) in which they discuss the way wave-like hemodynamic activity flows along brain architecture. Congrats, all! You can check it out the original publication and their perspective piece here!

The Ford Foundation Predoctoral, Dissertation, and Postdoctoral Fellowships seek to increase the diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties. Congrats, Jocelyn! You can read more here!  

The Kavli Postdoctoral Fellowships enable outstanding postdoctoral associates the opportunity to pursue new and innovative research at the interface of neuroscience and other disciplines under the joint supervision of mentors with different areas of expertise. Winnie’s project will investigate “Molecular Mechanisms of Neural and Cognitive Plasticity in Motherhood.” Congrats, Winnie! You can read more here!

In this article, Jocelyn discusses her recent work on the exclusionary practices within neuroimaging. Check out the story here!  

In this article, Dr. Avram Holmes discusses how the unique features of the brain’s white matter tracts can vary in psychiatric illness. Check out the story here!

Holmes Lab post-doc, Dr. Winnie Orchard’s new paper, Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain.” is out now in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Dr. Winnie Orchard’s et al.’s, review integrates human and animal maternal brain literature with theories of cognitive aging, to offer a framework for our understanding of maternal cognition across the lifespan! Winnie’s work also made the cover for the 2023 March Issue! Congrats, Winnie! Check out the paper here!  

Dr. Elvisha Dhamala is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, NY where she directs the Brain-Based Predictive Modeling Lab. Congrats, Elvisha! Check out more here!