Interview with Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo, 2023 OHBM Class of Fellows
Author: Yohan Yee
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth Dupre
A conversation with Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo, a 2023 OHBM Class Fellow, about his career trajectory.
Each year, OHBM honors eminent brain mappers with a Fellow of OHBM distinction. These individuals have “demonstrated academic and intellectual leadership in the disciplines represented by the Society over an extended period of time” and have the right to include FOHBM among their credentials. In 2023, three outstanding individuals were appointed as OHBM Fellows, including Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo.
(We have also interviewed the other 2023 Fellows of OHBM: Dr. Aina Puce and, previously, Dr. Karen Berman, along with other award winners as part of the 2023 Award Series).
Dr. Xi-Nian Zuo is a Professor at Beijing Normal University and Director of the Developmental Population Neuroscience Research Center, where he conducts population-level and lifespan neuroimaging research. He leads or contributes to several large-scale neuroscience efforts, including the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR), Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP), Brain Consortium for Reproducibility, Replicability and Reliability (3R-BRAIN), Chinese Imaging Genetics study (CHIMGEN), Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP), and Depression Imaging Research Consortium (DIRECT).
Dr. Zuo trained as an applied mathematician before jumping into the field of human brain mapping. Understanding the profound importance of quantifying reliability in measuring our brains’ function, his background provided a perfect basis to examine human spontaneous brain activity (SBA), a major topic of his research. His journey with OHBM started at the 14th Annual Meeting (Melbourne, 2008). At the time, he was just about to finish his first postdoctoral fellowship at Beijing Normal University and Chinese Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Professor Yu-Feng Zang and Professor Tianzi Jiang. He credits that meeting with providing an excellent platform for junior researchers to communicate their career development aspirations, and making possible his next postdoctoral position at New York University (NYU), where he trained in the field of pediatric neuroscience with Michael Milham and Francisco Xavier Castellanos.
In this interview, Dr. Zuo reflects on his career and OHBM, and provides a vision for the future.
Q1: What do you consider the highlight of your career so far?
Xi-Nian Zuo (XNZ): A career highlight would be establishing reliable measurements of individual differences in human spontaneous brain activity (SBA) over the past 15 years, through efforts such as evaluating test-retest reliability of most SBA metrics, initiating the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility, and theorizing psychometrical frameworks. A major scientific thread that connects these topics are a characterization of developmental trajectories of human brains across the lifespan, with a particular focus on the crucial period of childhood and adolescence. Specifically, my work has provided age-specific brain charting templates for both Chinese and US-born children, which have yielded novel insights such as the similarities and differences in large-scale cortical gradient topographies between children and young adults. These inclusive efforts have been anchored in international conferences on Human Brain Development, which I have founded and led, and have resulted in new stages of developmental cognitive neuroscience and developmental population neuroscience.
An overarching characteristic of these efforts are a dedication to open science principles; these motivate my involvement with large-scale projects including the 1000 Functional Connectome Project (FCP), the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP), the Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP), the Depression Imaging Research Consortium (DIRECT) and the Chinese Imaging Genetics study (CHIMGEN).
Q2: How have you been involved with the Organization and how has it changed over your tenure?
XNZ: I have been profoundly appreciative of OHBM for having shaped my career as an interdisciplinary researcher. My journey with OHBM began at the 14th Annual Meeting in 2008 (Melbourne, Australia). Over the past 15 years as a brain mapper, many of the aforementioned efforts have been facilitated by my personal experiences in OHBM. My first invited platform presentation, at the 2010 OHBM meeting, was ‘Googling the Brain’. Since then, focusing on reliability and reproducibility issues, I have been deeply involved in various OHBM events including Brainhack and education courses.
I have realized the importance of broadening participation in international brain mapping platforms. To further increase the inclusivity and diversity of the global brain mapping community, I launched an international meeting based in China, the International Conference on Human Brain Development (ICHBD), which has been held every two years for the past ten years. The ICHBD committee invited internationally distinguished scientists to attend the meetings, most scientists being active OHBM members. This has informed the broader OHBM community about the China neuroimaging community and its potential.
In 2018, I was elected to serve OHBM as a Council member and Program Chair. It has been my greatest pleasure to have had this opportunity to serve the OHBM community. During my time in office, although we faced multiple challenges due to the pandemic, OHBM has stayed strong and has been able to constantly provide an excellent platform and resources for global brain mappers to learn, exchange ideas, and develop. I am really honored to be named as a fellow of OHBM this year, which of course motivates me to continue such service. As above, OHBM has changed fast and transformed into a more influential stage for the community, and I will continue my responsibility of moving the field forward.
Q3: If you could start an entirely new research program right now, what would be the most exciting new direction for you to go in?
XNZ: I would combine mathematics, statistics, and neuroscience, applying these to brain experimental data with exceptional spatial or temporal sampling. One potential direction for me to consider is to recruit individuals from within the previous cohort I mentioned, the Chinese Color Nest Cohort, and collect additional data. This means that we now can track brain and mind changes of the hundreds of children and adolescents into their adulthood over a very long term (10 years), yielding a rich experimental resource for unlocking patterns of brain-mind development and their differential mechanisms under complex genetic-environment interactions. I name this entirely new stage CCNP program “Meet Our Kids Brain after A Decade”.
