Congratulations to Keelin for receiving the award for an outstanding poster presentation at this year's Brain Development conference organized by NeuroDevNet.
Her poster showed data from her master thesis on 'Typical emotional processing of special interest stimuli in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.'
This summer, we went for a (steep? not so steep?) hike along the Ford Knoll Trail and had a delicious barbeque/picnic by Forgot Me Not Pond in beautiful K-Country.
The perfect farewell for our summer students and a well-deserved day off for all of us, especially for Keelin who successfully defended her M.Sc. thesis the day before! Congrats, again!
We had fantastic summer students again this year who proudly presented their research at two research symposiums. Congrats to Prayash whose abstract was selected for an oral presentation!
Thanks to HBI and ACHRI for organizing these events for all summer students!
Christiane’s work on attention development in the brain is now online in Cerebral Cortex (click here or on the picture below to get your free copy).
We investigated age-related changes in attention skills in 4-7 year old children and how they are reflected in the changes in an important attention network in the brain. We found for one, that as expected, all the types of attention skills showed age-related improvements - the 7-year-olds were better at it than the 4-year-olds. Interestingly, we also found that being better in one specific attention skill went hand-in-hand with increased cross-talk within nodes of the brain network independent of the children’s age: selective attention. Selective attention is the type of attention that you need when you play "Where's Waldo?”. It is also important for reading or math skills, and the way it develops has implications for children who aren’t as good at it than others.
Christiane will be presenting a poster about her current research on: "Cerebellar functional connectivity predicts childhood ASD and ADHD traits".
Presentation time is Tuesday, June 28, from 12.45 to 14.45, though the poster will be up both Monday and Tuesday. Her poster # is 1107.
We're very happy that Manu's work on shape and volume differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder is now published in Neuropsychopharmacology. Feel free to check it out here or by clicking on the picture below. It's open access.
We collaborated with Dr. Mallar Chakravarty's group at McGill University who developed the MAGeT Brain algorithm for automated image segmentation. This allowed us to investigate volumetric and shape differences in a large pool of participants (N=757) taken from the Autism Brain Imaging Database Exchange.
We're very happy to have four motivated summer students in our lab this year! Kristina and Logan (middle and right, both Health Sciences) will be helping out with our ASD Learning study for which they will be using DTI and EEG. Anish (left, UAlberta) and Prayash (Biological Sciences) will be working with Christiane on our visual attention study.
Manu will be presenting her fMRI project at the 38th International Symposium of the Groupe de recherche sur le systeme nerveux central (GRSNC), "The neuroscience of decision-making".
Poster # 5, May 2 and 3, 12:45 - 14:00
...for receiving funding by the NSERC CREATE i3T Program! Christiane was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship and Dennis a graduate studentship.
The CREATE I3T Program is intended to prepare trainees to be future academic and commercial leaders, by providing them with cutting-edge technical skills and knowledge in Medical Imaging. Read more about it here.
Kari will be presenting a poster at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. You can meet her at the poster session on April 3rd, between 5-7 pm, where she will be presenting her work about associations between superior longitudinal fasciculus structure and attention skills in early childhood.
As part of the Child and Adolescent Imaging Research (CAIR) Program at the Alberta Children's Hospital, we are lucky to work together with four scientists who are specialized in pediatric neuroimaging. Check out the CAIR website here.
That also means great opportunities for socializing after work. We had our first CAIR social event last week.
... for winning this year's Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship! The scholarship rewards the high level of achievement of students pursuing graduate studies in Alberta.
...for a seed grant to probe applications of non-invasive brain stimulation using tDCS. We look forward to collaborating with Dr. Kirton!
Congratulations to Mark Krongold whose MSc thesis work on coordinated gray matter development is now online in Cerebral Cortex. Check out the abstract here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26656727
Christiane will be presenting her work on functional connectivity during early development at the 45th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, October 17-21. Thank you to the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute for awarding her a travel award to attend the meeting!
For this year's hiking trip of the CAIR program, we went to Grassi Lakes in Kananaskis. For some of us, the best thing about Calgary is how close it is to the mountains and it was wonderful to leave the city on Monday morning and spend a relaxed day in nature.
Come and meet us at the 16th Annual Allies for Autism Family Walk/Run. Some of us will be running the 5k race and we'll bring some cool brain drawings to colour, as well as bubbles and other fun things for the kids. Looking forward to it!
UPDATE: We had an amazing time at this year's Allies for Autism Walk/Run. We had some true artists coming to our table and were impressed by kids who could name some of the lobes of the brain. Manu and Signe enjoyed the run through beautiful Fish Creek Park and Signe even won the 10k race. Congratulations.
A big thank you to Allies for Autism for organising this event and connecting people. We're looking forward to next year.
... for being an awesome Summer Student. Siena worked with ASL data that we collected at the 3T MRI Scanner at the Alberta Children's Hospital and helped out scanning new participants whenever possible. She gave a great oral presentation at the Seaman MR Center on "Quantifying cerebral blood perfusion in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder using arterial spin labeling" and her abstract was chosen for a poster presentation at the ACHRI Summer Student Research Day.
We have been collaborating for over a year with Dr. Mallar Chakravarty on a project examining volumetric differences in subcortical structures in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Manu is currently visiting his lab where she will learn how to use the tools his group developed to do automated segmentation on subcortical structures from a multi-site dataset.
Besides the research, she's enjoying some real poutine, exploring the city and being able to brush up her French a bit.
We would like to thank ACHRI for funding her stay at the Douglas Institute.
If there was an award for research assistant of the year, Sarah would get it. Sarah has been in the lab for 1 1/2 years and has made huge contributions to our projects. We're especially grateful for her help with the recruitment and testing of participants for both our "ASD Learning" and "Visual Attention" studies. Her work on functional connectivity during childhood and adolescence was published in the Journal of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. If you haven't checked it out yet, click here.
We will miss her and wish her all the best for her future!
