Integrating diffusion MR tractography with transcriptional and anatomical variation translates time across model organisms and humans

Speaker: Christine Charvet

Assistant Professor, Center for Neuroscience, Delaware State University

Bio: Christine Charvet is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Neuroscience at Delaware State University. Christine acquired postdoctoral training in neuroimaging at Harvard Medical School and statistical genetics at Cornell University. Her research program leverages big data in genetics and neuroimaging to address fundamental questions in developmental and comparative neuroscience while providing practical applications to the biomedical community. For example, Christine and her colleagues developed a resource with which to find corresponding ages across humans and model organisms (http://translatingtime.org). This resource is often used by researchers who study model organisms (e.g., mice) and need to translate their findings to humans. Christine is funded by the National Institute of Health and has published 33 articles in her field. Her appointment at Delaware State University is part of a cross-institutional NIH-funded effort to enhance the research infrastructure of Delaware and increase diversity in biomedical sciences. 

Talk Abstract: The emergence of high-throughput, low-cost methods for sequencing, combined with advances in methods for non-destructive imaging provide new opportunities to study the human brain and its evolution. I will discuss my lab’s recent efforts to integrate RNA sequencing with diffusion MR imaging to find corresponding ages across the lifespan in humans and other species. I will use the same framework to investigate the evolution and development of circuits in the human lineage. Harnessing the integration of transcriptomic and connectomic information provides new and exciting opportunities to study conservation and variation in developmental programs giving rise to the human brain.