Achievement

The lab of Steve Petersen and Bradley Schlaggar have integrated across the three disciplines of CCSN to discover and characterize functional networks in the brain. Advances in magnetic resonance imaging technology have enabled precise measurements of correlated activity throughout the brain. This technique is done by correlating spontaneous BOLD activity, measured with resting state functional connectivity (rs-fcMRI), across the cortex. This tool has led to the first comprehensive descriptions of functional brain networks in humans. Petersen and Schlaggar aim to characterize the development of brain systems in a way that is comprehensive within a given system, as well as the relationships between systems in a wider network context. Their recent efforts have focused on the ways in which functional connectivity and network properties change across development, in aging, and in neuropsychiatric disorders. This work was recently reviewed in Current Opinion in Neurobiology.