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!  

Holmes Lab research assistant, Jocelyn Ricard’s new paper, Confronting racially exclusionary practices in the acquisition and analyses of neuroimaging data”, is out now in Nature Neuroscience. Jocelyn Ricard, et al.’s work highlights actionable ways and important challenges to move the fields of neuroscience and psychology forward in designing better studies to address the history of exclusionary practices in human brain mapping. Jocelyn’s perspective piece also made the cover for the 2023 January Issue! Check out more here! Congrats, Jocelyn!

March 29, 2023 Connor Lawhead, Holmes Lab research assistant from 2021-2023, will be pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Stony Brook University. Congratulations, Connor! We cannot wait to follow your work through grad school. Connor will be working under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Klein. Follow Connor and his research here.  

The Holmes Lab gives a farewell to former research assistants, Lia Chen and Julia Moses. Lia will begin a Ph.D. program in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University under Dr. Eve De Rosa, studying genetic and biological bases of neurodegenerative disease through fMRI. Julia will also begin a Ph.D. program in the Department of Developmental Psychology at City University of New York, the Graduate Center. She will focus on how young children about the world around them. Congratulations, Lia and Julia!

The Holmes Lab gives a farewell to former graduate student, Dr. Kevin Anderson. Kevin graduated from Yale and has become a post-doctoral researcher in Dr. Randy Buckner’s lab at Harvard University. Congrats, Kevin! At the same time, we welcome a new undergraduate researcher to the lab, James Cross. Welcome to the lab, James!

Dr. Holmes has been promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry! Congrats Dr. Holmes!