Large-scale Brain Network Dynamics in Health and Disease

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

4:00 PM-5:30 PM

BIOMED Seminar

Title:
Large-scale Brain Network Dynamics in Health and Disease: Reconfiguration Phenotypes and Structural Predictors

Speaker:
Danielle S. Bassett, PhD
Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor
Department of Bioengineering
University of Pennsylvania

Details:
Human thought is driven by well-controlled dynamic interactions between large-scale neural circuits or networks, enabling a broad set of human behaviors. In this talk, I will discuss recent work using network-analysis algorithms to test the recruitment and integration of large-scale functional neural circuitry during language processing, human skill learning, cognitive control, and executive function more broadly. These data motivate a discussion of the fact that fundamental principles constraining the control of these dynamic network processes have remained elusive.

In the second part of the talk, I will discuss recent work based on diffusion spectrum imaging data to estimate hard-wired pathways connecting different areas of the human brain. Using the mathematical foundation of network control theory, we show that structural network differences between subgraphs in the brain dictate their distinct roles in controlling brain function. Moreover, these roles are altered during normative neurodevelopment, and can be predicted by relatively parsimonious rewiring rules. Collectively, our results support the view that macroscale structural design underlies basic cognitive control processes via the fundamental mechanism of network controllability.

Biosketch:
Danielle S. Bassett is the Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She is most well-known for her work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. She received a BS in physics from the Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind.

In 2012, Dr. Bassett was named American Psychological Association's `Rising Star' and given an Alumni Achievement Award from the Schreyer Honors College at Pennsylvania State University for extraordinary achievement under the age of 35. In 2014, she was named an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow and received the MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant. In 2015, she received the IEEE EMBS Early Academic Achievement Award, and was named an ONR Young Investigator. In 2016, she received an NSF CAREER award and was named one of Popular Science’s Brilliant 10.

Dr. Bassett is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts. Her work -- which has resulted in 112 published articles -- has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

Contact Information

Ken Barbee
215-895-1335
barbee@drexel.edu