Blog Posts

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I direct the MATTER lab’s research and development of devices, apps, and informatics and analysis tools. I am passionate about creating tools to help people and to help us better understand the human mind. All the work that I do adheres to the principles of open science, where researchers openly share data, code, resources and ideas. Below is a picture of my office, with a few remaining Halloween costumes, and a view into the MATTER Lab:

Previous mobile health work

Prior to joining the Child Mind Institute, I was the scientific lead on the mPower Parkinson mobile health research study launched by Apple in partnership with Sage Bionetworks. The mPower study is an example of how mobile devices can vastly scale up open medical research, in this case by tracking symptoms of Parkinson disease from iPhone sensors in thousands of participants. In the course of this work, I created an open source software pipeline for analyzing sensor data and designed interactive visualizations to present results to patients, clinicians and researchers.

Brain image analysis

I am the main developer of the open source Mindboggle software for automated brain feature extraction, labeling and shape analysis. Using the Mindboggle software, I helped to complete the largest brain shape study ever conducted, and published some of the largest brain image analysis evaluation studies ever performed. For this research program, I oversaw the construction of a new brain labeling protocol and the world’s largest manually labeled set of brain images.

Publications

• Personal publications page
• Open Science Framework page for all papers, posters, proposals, and presentations
• Google Scholar for some of my publications.

Experience

• Director of Neuroimaging (2014-2016)
  Principal Scientist of Systems Biology
  Sage Bionetworks, Seattle, WA
• Research Assistant Professor (2012-2013)
  Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science
  State University of New York at Stony Brook
• Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology (2007-2012)
  Division of Molecular Imaging and Neuropathology, Department of Psychiatry
  New York State Psychiatric Institute
  Columbia University
• Information Synthesis Theorist and Program Analyst (2004-2007)
  Parsons Institute for Information Mapping
  The New School, NY

Education

• PhD in Neuroscience (2004)
  Weill Medical College, Cornell University, NY
  • Functional MRI Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
  • Functional MRI Research Center, Columbia University
• Computation and Neural Systems Program
  California Institute of Technology
• MS in Media Arts and Sciences (1996), Spatial Imaging Group
  MIT Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• BS in Biopsychology, Perception and Cognition Studies (1993)
  University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)

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