Brain meeting: Professor Karla Miller

Brain meeting

There is an increasing consensus in the neuroscience community that the next major advances in neuroscience require us to span scales, species and tools.  In this talk, I’ll present examples of how our group is taking this challenge on, focusing on a series of studies of the callosal white matter pathways.  I’ll show MRI-histology comparisons that we conducted to validate diffusion models of tissue microstructure, which led to novel observations about callosal fibre architecture.  These insights in a small number of ex-vivo samples generated new hypotheses that we could test in-vivo at the scale of populations, using the UK Biobank data to identify relationships between functional connectivity and white matter microstructure.  I will conclude by discussing future work that we hope will close a very satisfying loop by taking these genetic links to rodent knockouts where we can link MRI to… histology.  In the interest of transparency for those early in their research careers, I might also touch on how this tidy package bears no resemblance to the actual experience of conducting these studies, which was more often than not frustrating, puzzling and heavily reliant on serendipity. But ultimately extremely satisfying

There will be coffee, tea and cake in the conservatory directly after the talk.