Join us on Thursday, December 5th for Research Day. It is a special opportunity for the CCBBI community to come together and celebrate the science.
We are excited to welcome Dr. Natasha Rajah for the Keynote Address and to welcome back Drs. Stephanie Aghamoosa, Charlie Ferris and Paul Scotti for the Featured Alumni Presentations.
Registration is now open and closes on December 1. Please note that Research Day is in person only this year.
The deadline to submit an abstract for a talk or poster presentation is November 4th. Awards will be given for the best talk and poster presentations. The recipients will receive $500 that can be used to attend a scientific conference of their choosing.
Keynote Address: Dr. Natasha Rajah
Dr. Natasha Rajah received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, St. George Campus; and did her postdoctoral training at U.C. Berkeley. She was a Professor at McGill University from 2005 to 2023 before joining the Department of Psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) in Fall 2023 as a tenured Full Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Sex, Gender, and Diversity in Brain Health, Memory and Aging. Dr. Rajah uses multidisciplinary methods, including MRI, to investigate how sex, gender, and social determinants of health contribute to individual differences in brain and cognitive function in aging. She is an Editor-in-Chief for Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, Senior Editor for Brain Research and serves as Vice-Chair of the CIHR’s Institute of Aging Advisory Board; and is the EDI Lead for the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) in Phase III.
Title: The effect of biological sex and menopause status on episodic memory and related brain function at midlife: The BHAMM Study
Abstract: Our ability to encode, store and retrieve past experiences in rich contextual details (episodic memory) declines with age and can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) – a disease that is more prevalent in females than males. Recent evidence also suggests that midlife is a critical period in adulthood when episodic memory decline and changes in brain regions affected by AD arise. Midlife is also the time that females with ovaries experience spontaneous menopause. Yet, little is known about how biological sex, menopause, and age affect episodic memory and related brain systems at midlife; and how this may differ in adult with risk factors for AD. In this talk I will present results from the ongoing Brain Health at Midlife and Menopause (BHAMM) study which aims to fill this knowledge gap and determine what factors support and/or hinder memory and brain function in males and females at midlife. Our initial results suggest that middle-aged females, but not males, exhibited age-related episodic memory decline, and that this effect was observed at post-menopause. Task-based fMRI analysis shows that memory decline at post-menopause was associated with altered activity in parahippocampal, posterior parietal and occipital cortices. Together these studies highlight the importance of considering biological sex and endocrine aging in the cognitive neuroscience of aging and dementia prevention.
Featured Alumni Presentations
Dr. Stephanie Aghamoosa is a clinical neuropsychologist and Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina with expertise in using cognitive assessments and fMRI to study aging and Alzheimer's disease. She obtained her PhD at Ohio State in 2020 under the mentorship of Dr. Ruchika Prakash, conducting research on characterizing age-related neurocognitive changes and testing behavioral interventions to enhance cognitive and emotional function in older adults. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship specializing in the clinical neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience of early Alzheimer’s disease at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she is now a tenure-track faculty member. Her ongoing research is focused on developing non-pharmacological interventions to slow the clinical progression of Alzheimer’s disease. She is conducting technology-leveraged clinical trials of non-invasive brain stimulation and cognitive training designed to maximize neuroplasticity, using fMRI and digital health technology to sensitively measure intervention effects.
Title: Leveraging Functional Connectivity to Develop Effective Interventions for Early Alzheimer’s Disease
Abstract: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by progressive cognitive impairments that are accompanied by widespread alterations in brain structure and function. The early stages of AD represent a critical window of opportunity for disease detection and intervention, but changes in cognition and brain function during this period are subtle and difficult to detect. However, advanced fMRI analysis techniques offer a promising avenue for sensitively characterizing and tracking early AD-related network alterations. In this talk, I will review my work using functional connectivity to reveal brain network disruptions that relate to cognitive deficits in preclinical AD. I will then discuss our clinical trials of non-invasive brain stimulation for improving cognition in mild cognitive impairment due to AD that integrate functional connectivity as an outcome measure to capture treatment effects, investigate neural mechanisms, and guide intervention development. I will discuss how recent AI advances have enabled high-quality reconstructions of seen images from solely fMRI brain activity. Specifically, we leveraged large-scale fMRI data to align brain activity to the pre-trained embedding space of CLIP via diffusion models and contrastive learning. Subsequently we developed a simple approach to achieve high-quality reconstruction results with just 1 hour of fMRI training data by aligning multiple participants to a shared latent space.
Charlie Ferris is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University where he researches neural mechanisms supporting memory in humans. Charlie earned his Ph.D. at Emory University in Georgia working with Dr. Stephan Hamann, and then completed his first post-doc at The Ohio State University under the supervision of Dr. Baldwin Way. By combining fMRI, brain stimulation, and behavioral approaches, Charlie tests how brain networks dynamically process different types of memory content. As Charlie’s current work investigates episodic memory formation, consolidation, and retrieval using naturalistic stimuli in humans, he recommends you read this bio carefully as there may be a quiz on this information during his talk.
Title: Hippocampal-cortical networks predict conceptual versus perceptually guided narrative memory
Abstract: If the same basic story is told with a focus on different details, is the memory representation for the core elements of the story the same? Or does the underlying memory trace shift to match the surrounding details? Current theories of event memory propose distinct connections between the hippocampus and neocortical regions to support processing different types of content in memory. Additionally, it has been established that hippocampal connectivity supports integrating disparate content into unified event memories. This suggests that changing the way that an event is described could change the underlying neural representation of integrated event memories. We tested this proposition by developing event narratives that described the same core story with identical central story details (e.g., grocery shopping), but described with additional descriptive details related to the story that were conceptual or perceptual in nature. Using fMRI, we established hippocampal connectivity patterns as a group of human participants encoded these narratives, and then related these patterns to later memory for the narrative details. We found distinct patterns of hippocampal-cortical connectivity during encoding of the identical central event details when they were embedded between conceptual vs. perceptual details.
Dr. Paul Scotti is Head of Neuroimaging & AI at Stability AI and a visiting scientist at Princeton University, where he did his postdoc with Dr. Ken Norman. Paul leads the MedARC Neuroimaging & AI Lab which adopts an open lab concept where the research team is almost entirely composed of volunteers working together on open-source neuroAI projects. Paul did his Ph.D at The Ohio State University co-advised by Dr. Julie Golomb and Dr. Andy Leber, where he worked on projects including attraction/repulsion dynamics surrounding visual mnemonic representations and novel improvements to the inverted encoding model technique used in neuroimaging.
Title: Reconstructing seen images from fMRI brain activity
Abstract: I will discuss how recent AI advances have enabled high-quality reconstructions of seen images from solely fMRI brain activity. Specifically, we leveraged large-scale fMRI data to align brain activity to the pre-trained embedding space of CLIP via diffusion models and contrastive learning. Subsequently we developed a simple approach to achieve high-quality reconstruction results with just 1 hour of fMRI training data by aligning multiple participants to a shared latent space.