Neurogenesis Speaker Series kicks off 2024 edition
Last week, HBHL hosted the first Neurogenesis Speaker Series talk of 2024 at The Neuro, featuring Danilo Bzdok, MD, PhD and Katie Lavigne, PhD.
Danilo Bzdok’s presentation, 'On hammer-nail matching in the neuroscience application domain, explored innovative applications of neuroscience tools,' while Katie Lavigne’s talk, 'Cognitive and brain health in transdiagnostic psychiatry,' highlighted her research on improving mental health outcomes across diagnostic boundaries.
It was an opportunity for attendees to connect with HBHL’s faculty recruits, discuss their groundbreaking research and network with peers from diverse disciplines during the post-event reception.
Mark your calendars for the next event in this series on February 5, 2025, at The Neuro, featuring Paul Masset and Pouya Bashivan. Stay tuned—registration details will be announced soon!
About the December 2024 Speakers
Danilo Bzdok
Danilo Bzdok is a medical doctor and computer scientist with a dual background in systems neuroscience and machine learning algorithms. After training at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Université de Lausanne (Switzerland) and Harvard Medical School (USA), he completed one PhD in cognitive neuroscience (Jülich Research Centre, Germany) and one PhD in computer science in machine learning statistics at INRIA Saclay and Neurospin (France). Danilo currently serves as Associate Professor at ۲ݮƵ's Faculty of Medicine and as Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Montreal, Canada, including cross-appointments at the McConnell Brain Imaging Center, Montreal Neurological Institute, Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health and the School of Computer Science at ۲ݮƵ University. His interdisciplinary research activity centres on narrowing knowledge gaps in the brain basis of human-defining types of thinking, with a special focus on the higher association cortex in health and disease.
Katie Lavigne
Katie Lavigne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at ۲ݮƵ University and a Researcher at the Douglas Research Centre, where she also leads the Douglas Open Science Program. She received a PhD in Neuroscience in 2018 from the University of British Columbia and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Neuro and Douglas Research Centre in 2023. Her research focuses on cognitive dysfunction in psychiatric disorders, “from EMA to MRI”, including developing open-source digital tools to improve cognitive assessment, measuring cognitive variability using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and identifying mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction with multimodal magnetic resonance imaging and computational neuroscience techniques.