Jonathan Simon Biology / Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Maryland, College Park Thanks to Luiz Pessoa for MNC slides

 NSF grant by NACS faculty 3 Tesla Siemens MRI machine

 Funds from the campus: $2-3 million Broad support across several colleges (BSOS, ENGR, CMNS, etc.)  Northeast of campus Across route 193 Off Metzerott road

 Multiple modalities for brain research MRI EEG: Electroencephalography (soon) MEG: Magnetoencephalography (~ 1 year)

 Basic studies of perception, cognition, and emotion  Clinically relevant research Autism, Dyslexia, Anxiety, Addiction, etc.  Work with adults and children Not yet with animals (only barrier is $$)

 Determine “activations” to task conditions Region does X! e.g., V1 “does” orientation processing

 Ocular dominance columns Because of the connectivity from eye to cortex, eye-of-origin related columns exist in early visual cortex Horton

 Ocular dominance columns with fMRI In-plane resolution: 470 x 470 µm Column width: 1.1 mm session 1 session 2 SA Horton

 Machine learning to “decode” brain states What is the person seeing?

 Graph-theoretic analysis How are brain regions organized as a function of condition, population (autism vs. control), etc.?  Nodes: brain regions  Edges: “functional connectivity” between regions Correlation

 Reconstructing physical connection paths Fiber_Tractography.JPG Hippocampal_sclerosis.jpg

 Run the same experiment with functional MRI and MEG  Integrating the two modalities Spatial resolution of functional MRI Temporal resolution of MEG t = 32 mst = 38 msFrom Ou et al (2009)

 Introductory course in the Fall Upper level undergraduate Graduate  Intermediate/advanced course in Spring Graduate

 $600/hour  Seed funding available Faculty Students + Faculty Idea is that pilot data will be used for grant application to support research

 Meets every other Friday from noon-1 Focus on MRI, MEG, and EEG related work Open to all techniques that study the brain!

 Come visit sometime!