NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH DAY
THE GREAT DEBATE:
Can fMRI teach us how the brain works?
Jody Culham, PhD
Dr. Jody Culham is a Professor in the Department of Psychology. Her research investigates how vision is used for perception and to guide actions in human adults. She uses a combination of cognitive neuroscience techniques -- including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), behavioral psychophysics and kinematics, neuropsychology, and neurostimulation. One theme of her work is bringing cognitive neuroscience closer to everyday life by studying natural behavior and brain processing in real-world situations and compelling virtual-reality simulations. Dr. Culham received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Calgary and a PhD from Harvard University before joining Western as a postdoctoral fellow and then faculty member.
Ravi Menon, PhD
Dr. Ravi Menon is a Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging and Psychiatry at Western University, where he is also a member of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience and the Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering and Scientific Director of Western’s Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (CFMM), Canada’s National ultra-high field MRI facility. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and also a Senior Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
His research is funded by numerous agencies including a CIHR Foundation Grant, an NSERC Discovery grant and a $66M Canada First Research Excellence Fund Award to Western, which he co-directs.
Julio Martinez-Trujillo, MD, PhD
Julio Martinez-Trujillo is Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and Scientist at the Robarts Research Institute. He holds an Academic Chair in Autism. Prior to joining Western University in 2014, he was Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience at McGill UniversityUnderstanding the neurophysiological basis of cognition is one of the greatest challenges faced by neuroscientists. In the last decades we have made considerable progress searching for neural correlates of cognitive functions in the primate brain, however what we currently know is just the tip of the iceberg.The laboratory uses a combination of techniques such as behavioral measurements, extra-cellular single cell recordings and brain mapping in order to explore the physiology of cognition, more specifically, the physiology of attention, visuomotor transformations and motion perception. Ultimately, the results of our research will be applied to the study of diseases that affect human health.
Marieke Mur, PhD
Dr. Marieke Mur is an assistant Professor in Psychology and Computer Science at Western University. Her research brings together psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to understand how the human brain supports perception and cognition. Work in the lab focuses on how the brain interprets and flexibly responds to the outside visual world. Dr. Mur addresses these questions using psychophysics, neuroimaging, and computational modelling.