Justine Hansen

Please join us on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, 2:00 PM, for the next CIC Imaging Series.

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Speaker

Justine Hansen
PhD Student

Biography

Justine Hansen is a final year PhD candidate in the Network Neuroscience lab, studying with Dr. Bratislav Misic at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Her research is focused on how the brain operates as an integrated whole.

Title

The integrated brain

Abstract

The development of advanced neuroimaging techniques has resulted in an increasingly detailed picture of the human brain. In parallel, the open science movement has given researchers from diverse disciplines access to an unprecedented number of human brain maps. Integrating multimodal, multiscale human brain maps is necessary for broadening our understanding of brain structure and function. In this talk, I will present two avenues of my work: first, I will show how biological features such as neurotransmitter receptors, synapse types, cell types, and dynamics can be overlayed on the connectome, yielding annotated networks. Second, I will demonstrate that by extending the human cortical annotated connectome to the brainstem, we find that multiple organizational features of the cortex (including neurophysiological oscillatory rhythms, patterns of cognitive functional specialization, and the unimodal-transmodal functional hierarchy) can be traced back to the brainstem. Altogether, biologically annotated connectomes offer a compelling way to study neural wiring in concert with local biological features.