Understanding the brain and how it functions in health and disease is what drives research supported by Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives (HBHL) at ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ, but real progress depends on sharing and combining insight across disciplines.
To promote cross-pollination, HBHL brought together 450 scientists, students, and partners for its annual Symposium and Research Day, May 2 to 3, 2019.
These back-to-back events presented the latest research advances in brain and mental health from HBHL-supported investigators and trainees.
At the Symposium, on May 2, participants heard from the leaders of HBHL’s interdisciplinary Discovery Funds, who are working across the initiative’s four themes to link the biology of brain function to computation and cognition.
Neuroinformatics to support breakthrough research
One of HBHL’s primary goals is to encourage interdisciplinary research across fields linked by neuroinformatics--the application of computational models and analytical tools to neuroscience data. Despite recent advances in big data analytics, researchers still lack effective tools to combine data from different domains, which is critical for making new discoveries.
Tackling this bottleneck is the Discovery Fund team led by , which is creating novel analytic strategies that take advantage of genetics, multimodal imaging and behaviour data to understand and predict healthy and pathological trajectories in individuals.
According to Misic, eight new software packages have been developed and will be integrated into HBHL’s NeuroHub, an open science platform to publish, find and work with multi-modal data. Eventually, NeuroHub will be able to support a wide range of applications to assist neuroscience researchers at ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ and beyond.
Innovative ideas acrossÌýresearch domains
Researchers also presented smaller but no less innovative projects in a series of Flash Talks that illustrated the scope of work supported by HBHL, including new findings in the pre-clinical progression of Alzheimer’s disease; vascularizing mini-brains to better understand neurodegenerative disease progression; training neural networks to improve the classification image data, and the interaction between prenatal adversity and genetics to predict ADHD.
HBHL Scientific Director Alan Evans moderated a panel discussion, From Big Data to Big Knowledge, on the challenges and opportunities of translating work supported by HBHL into outcomes that will benefit researchers, patients and society.
The panel drew on the expertise of new ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ faculty members Rosemary Bagot and , HBHL Associate Scientific Director , and guest panellists of Oxford University, of Emory University, and of Boston Children’s Hospital.
What emerged from the discussion was the importance of stimulating innovation and commercialization, particularly in the risk-averse Canadian context. Participants underscored the potential for industry collaboration given the dynamism of Montreal’s emerging AI hub.
HBHL trainees take centre-stage
Research Day, held at ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ’s New Residence Hall, followed the Symposium.
Organized by the HBHL Trainee Committee, Research Day gave trainees an opportunity to present their work, celebrate their accomplishments and network with peers, faculty and industry representatives.
All HBHL-supported graduate students and postdoctoral fellows participated in the day’s activities, which included a poster competition and speed networking. , from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, gave the keynote lecture on exploring the neural landscape of imagination in abstract spaces. HBHL was also pleased to host trainees from partner institutions, Western University and l’Université de Montréal.
These two annual events would not have been possible without the generous support of our funders, sponsors and partners, and the volunteers who gave their time and energy to keep both days running smoothly.
See photos of the Symposium and Research Day in our Past Events.
Learn more about the high-quality research and researchers HBHL is supporting in Funded Projects.
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