This was a unique podcast in that while I knew his work, I didn’t know him personally, and realized we are in a way, kindred spirits. We’re both physicists working at the interface of MRI acquisition and brain physiology and function, trying our best to plumb ever more information - quantitative information about how our brains are organized and how they change with disease and how they vary among individuals. His emphasis is more on structural MRI. Here we talk about his professional history, get into real time feedback fMRI, and then delve into his work on quantitative MRI for deriving maps of myelin, iron content, fiber track direction, and more - all at unprecedented resolutions using their unique Connectome scanner - one of only four in the world.

Guest:

Professor Nick Weiskopf is the Director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from Graduate School of Neural & Behavioural Sciences and International Max Planck Research School in Tübingen, Germany

In 2004 he moved to the Welcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London in the UK. First as a senior research fellow, but quickly moving up to head the Physics Group there in 2006, and becoming a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to an associate professor) in 2009. Finally in 2014 he became full professor of MRI Physics at the UCL Institute of Neurology, however in 2015 he was recruited to the Directorship of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Insitute for Human Cognitive an Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

Regarding the Department of Neurophysics:

The vision is to develop and apply functional microstructure imaging and in-vivo histology using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as novel non-invasive MRI methods to reliably characterize the detailed functional and anatomical microstructure of the human brain, and in this regard, he has been overwhelmingly successful, producing consistently pioneering work and defining and surpassing the limits of what structural and physiologic information MRI may derive from the brain.