Today, our guest is Shella Keilholz. Dr. Keilholz received her Bachelor's in Physics from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1997, and her PhD in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia in 2004. She went on to a do a post-doc at NIH in Dr. Alan Koretsky's lab and in 2004 joined the department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University as a faculty member. She is now a full professor at Emory University and also closely affiliated with Georgia Tech.

Since around 2008 she has been uncovering new spatial and temporal patterns in resting state fMRI. She was the first to identify spatial propagation of wave-like behavior in the resting state time series and in 2011 coined the term quasi-periodic patterns (QPP) to describe whole brain networks that dominate much of the resting state signal. Recently, she and others have described three such patterns that account for most of the variance. Here we not only talk about her career but also delve into how these quasi-periodic patterns mesh with the current landscape of diverse features of resting state fMRI that continue to be found. She has shown that these patterns may have a central driver and may relate to such things as vasomotion, global signal, arousal state, and attention. In general, there is much more information from basic neurophysiology to cognition that remains to be derived from resting state fMRI, and Shella is among those leading the effort.

This was an incredibly stimulating and fun discussion. We hope you enjoy it!

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch