Today the discussion centered on physiologic fMRI and MRI. Generally, when people think of fMRI they think of a way to map brain function, however, there is so much information about neurovascular physiology in the signal. Most do fMRI, but don’t realize a) all the potential untapped information in the fMRI time series and b) all the potential confounds. What Jean and Molly do is focus on a and b in overlapping yet unique ways. Overlapping in that they both use physiologic manipulations and an array of acquisition methods to probe and characterize details of the hemodynamic response to determine physiologic parameters. Unique in that they have focused on different aspects of the HRF. Also in this podcast, we’ll be discussing the challenge of women in their positions - running a lab - and how the life of women scientists might be improved.

Guests:

Jean Chen PhD. Dr. Chen received her MSc (2004) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Calgary, and her PhD (2009) in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University. She completed her postdoctoral work on multimodal MRI of brain aging at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and Harvard Medical School (2011), then joined The University of Toronto Medical Biophysics Program as faculty. She is a Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Aging.

Molly Bright PhD. Following a B.S. in physics from MIT in 2006, Molly received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2011 as part of a collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, working with Peter Jezzard at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB) and Jeff Duyn in the Advanced MRI group of NINDS. She completed postdoctoral training at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC). She then moved to Nottingham as an independent Anne McLaren Fellow, to develop ultra-high-field MR imaging methods for studying cerebral physiology in neurological diseases at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre. In 2018, she returned home to America to lead the Applied Neuro-Vascular Imaging Lab at Northwestern University.