Drs. Katie Lavigne and Alban Voppel obtain BBRF Young Investigator grants

September 30, 2024

We are proud to announce that two of our researchers, Dr. Katie Lavigne and Dr. Alban Voppel (a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Lena Palaniyappan‘s lab), have been awarded the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator Grant. This award provides up to $35,000 per year for two years, for a total of $70,000, to enable promising young investigators to continue their research training or launch their careers as independent professors.

Since 1987, the Young Investigator program has awarded more than $326 million to researchers worldwide, helping them gather the data they need to secure larger federal or university funding. Thanks to this grant, Drs. Katie Lavigne and Alban Voppel will be able to advance their work in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry, contributing to the advancement of knowledge about mental health and behavioural disorders

  • Dr. Katie Lavigne’s project aims to study the dysfunction of predictive coding, a brain mechanism that may explain positive symptoms such as delusions in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Predictive coding helps the brain to adjust its expectations according to new experiences. Thanks to advances in ultra-high-field magnetic resonance imaging (UHF MRI, as in 7 Tesla), it is now possible to distinguish activity in different layers of the cerebral cortex, enabling more detailed exploration of the signals flowing through the brain. This study focuses on 30 patients with schizophrenia or related psychotic disorders, as well as 30 healthy controls. The aim is to understand how information transmission mechanisms between cortical layers contribute to delusions in schizophrenia.

 

  • Dr. Alban Voppel’s project will use neuroimaging, natural language processing (NLP) and neuromodulation to study and treat alogia (difficulty expressing oneself) in people with schizophrenia. This project will analyze recorded interviews focusing on prosody, speech density and fluency, using advanced NLP techniques to quantify these features.The team will work with data from the Psychosis Consortium and the TOPSY study, involving over 370 participants. By comparing speech samples with clinical assessments of alogia, they will seek to understand how linguistic features relate to symptom severity. They will also map frontotemporal neural connectivity using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to better understand the neural basis of speech disorders in schizophrenia.

 

Congratulations to Drs. Katie Lavigne and Alban Voppel!