ABOUT FANS

FANS is one of Europe’s largest research groups and one of the few teams in the world bringing together leading experts in brain development and pro and antisocial behaviours across the lifespan.

We are part of the IOPPN, world-renowned for the quality of its research and for producing more highly cited publications in psychiatry and mental health (Scopus, 2016) than any other university in the world.

MEETING FOCUS

Talk 1: The Allen Human Brain Atlas (AHBA) has opened an entire new field of research based on the integration of brain-wide mRNA maps with neuroimaging. This has been made possible because the AHBA offers an unprecedented dataset containing mRNA expression measures of >20,000 genes covering the whole brain and, critically, in standard MNI space. In this talk, Mattia will present a carousel of the most relevant applications of AHBA in neuroimaging, highlighting its value for neuroscience and revising its principal methodological limitations.Mattia is a Senior Molecular Imaging Scientist at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences (IoPPN). His work focuses on the development and validation of neuroimaging biomarkers in human and animal models.

Talk 2: There is an urgent need to understand the emergence of brain connectivity and its association with neurodevelopmental disorders. However, interpretation of network measures is a complex task, requiring thorough consideration of methodological details. In this talk, Dafnis will review what we have learned about brain networks during development, and the potential of new computational methods to both predict outcome from the neonatal connectome and provide mechanistic insight on the link between brain and behaviour. Dafnis is a Lecturer at the FANS department (IoPPN). His work focuses on the characterisation and modelling of brain connectivity during early development, with the aim to obtain markers of atypical neurodevelopmental trajectories.

For more information please contact: marija-magdalena.petrinovic@kcl.ac.uk