Special NE speaker March 11: Amy Kuceyeski, Weill Cornell Medical College.

March 11, Wed.  3-4:15pm in T-402 at CCNY Steinman Hall

Dr. Amy Kuceyeski: “The (dys)-connectome: quantifying brain network influences in disease and recovery“

How the human brain successfully completes varied and complex tasks is still largely unknown. In the past, brain-behavior relationships were derived from single subject studies wherein a focal lesion was linked to a corresponding impairment in a one-to-one manner. Recently developed neuroimaging methods, however, have allowed an unprecedented investigation of the workings of the human brain in health and disease. Neuroimaging methods are now able to measure the in vivo structural or functional connectivity between different brain regions. Studies of brain networks in health (the connectome) and disease (the dys-connectome) have begun to shed light on the true nature of brain-behavior relationships, which in most cases is many-to-many. This talk will present some recent work on statistical modeling of connectome-behavior relationships in disease as well as some preliminary work in mathematical modeling of network-level brain plasticity in recovery from injury. It is imperative that we understand the brain and its connectome if we aim to restore proper function after disease or injury.

Dr. Amy Kuceyeski is an assistant professor of Mathematics and Neuroscience in the Radiology Department and the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College.