Rebecca Shafee

Please join us on Wednesday, September 19, 2024, 2:00 PM, for the next CIC Imaging Series.

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Speaker

Rebecca Shafee
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the NIMH

Biography

Rebecca Shafee is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Section on Developmental Neurogenomics at the NIMH, where her research focuses on understanding the biological basis of sex-differences in brain structure and function using neuroimaging and statistical genetics techniques. Rebecca’s academic training is in physics – she received her B.S. from Caltech and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her Ph.D. thesis tackled the problem of estimating how fast black holes spin. At the postdoctoral level she transitioned to research in neuroscience as a Swartz Fellow, focusing on neuroimaging (Harvard University), followed by further training in statistical genetics at the Broad Institute. Her current and past projects combine large complex datasets with cutting edge neuroimaging and statistical genetics techniques to investigate the genetic basis of brain structure and function in health as well as in disease.

Title

Sex differences in the genetic architecture of the human brain anatomy

Abstract

Our understanding of genetic influences on human brain anatomy has expanded rapidly in recent years due to the availability of combined neuroimaging and genetic information in large datasets. However, with few exceptions, this growing and impactful literature has typically combined the male and female participants rather than directly compared genetic influences on brain anatomy between the two groups. I will talk about the findings from our recent screen for sex differences in the common genetic architecture of over 1000 neuroanatomical phenotypes in the UK Biobank.