Dr. Peter Bandettini spends a lot of time peering into people's heads. Not because he is clairvoyant, but because he is a biophysicist. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a revolutionary neuroimaging technique he helped pioneer in the '90s, Dr. Bandettini delves into the mysteries of the human brain. He is working to advance fMRI technology to parse out more information about the neural connections that are constantly and spontaneously active even when we think our minds are blank.
Anybody who observes a person with a neurological illness like Tourette syndrome or schizophrenia can clearly see how these conditions affect behavior. What’s much more difficult to determine is how these ailments relate to changes in the brain. Dr. Armin Raznahan is a child psychiatrist who uses a genetics-first approach and state-of-the-art neuroimaging tools to examine how the size and shape of the brain differ in children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders compared to healthy individuals. His discoveries about these illnesses could ultimately improve our ability to identify and treat people who have them, as well as predict which children might develop them.
