Making connections in the adolescent brain

Plenary talk at ENDO 2017

Abstract: Adolescence is a period of human brain growth and high incidence of mental health disorders. I will present findings that adolescent cortical myelination and shrinkage are coupled and specifically associated with a dorsoventrally patterned gene expression profile enriched for synaptic, oligodendroglial- and schizophrenia-related genes. The topologically efficient and biologically expensive hubs of the brain anatomical network are located in association cortical regions and have the most pronounced changes during adolescence.

Bio: Dr Kirstie Whitaker is a postdoctoral researcher in the Brain Mapping Unit at the University of Cambridge working with Prof Ed Bullmore. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and is a passionate advocate for reproducible neuroscience. She is an Fulbright scholarship alumna and 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. In July 2017 she will join The The Alan Turing Institute as a Research Fellow.