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Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics Speaker Series
Our #KCNISpeakerSeries is designed to highlight research topics, share knowledge and spark conversation among leading scientists and research institutions worldwide in the field of neuroinformatics, computational neuroscience and psychiatry.
The series features speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, expressing the diversity of the Krembil Centre’s scientific breadth. Each month we hear a new perspective on the current state of multi-scale neuroscience, from gene to circuits, from brain dynamics to cognitive modeling and populations.
Building a strong, and innovative research community includes encouraging diverse expertise, cross-knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation across all scientists. KCNI’s Speaker Series showcases the real contributions experiences by recognize scientists around the world. Through these forums, we can inspire each other, in order to better define, prevent and treat mental illnesses.
Cindy Khuu, Manager of Neuroinformatics Operations
Presenter: DR. Dimitris Pinotsis - City St George's—University of London
Topic: On model-based biomarkers
Abstract:Psychiatric phenotypes often mask diverse circuit mechanisms, motivating biomarkers that are mechanistic rather than purely phenomenological. In recent work using event related EEG during cognitive control, Bayesian model comparison favored feedforward connectivity and intrinsic within-region modulations as key loci of condition effects; classifiers trained on these model-based parameters matched or outperformed equalsized ERP feature sets, suggesting a lower-dimensional, biologically anchored representation that better captures between-subject variability. Building on this framework, I will review recent findings in schizophrenia and familial risk, with a particular focus on aberrant frontal-cortex neurotransmission. Special emphasis will be placed on how these abnormalities manifest in brain oscillations and transient wave propagation. Together, these results illustrate how model-based analyses can bridge sensor patterns and circuit hypotheses, clarifying when and where abnormalities arise (auditory vs. frontal), what mechanisms they imply (feedforward/connectivity vs. intrinsic gain), and how such parameters may serve as interpretable, generalizable biomarkers for parsing heterogeneity and familial vulnerability across disorders.
Date: October 7, 2025
Watch the video (available soon)
July 2025 talk
Presenter: DR. Vilas Menon - Columbia University, Department of Neurology
Topic: Dissecting molecular heterogeneity in Alzheimer’s Disease at the cell type level
Abstract: Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), while being the most prevalent cause of dementia in aged individuals, is a complex, multifactorial disease for which effective treatments are still in the early stages. By examining post-mortem brain tissue from large cohorts of individuals with and without diagnoses of AD, coupled with pathological and ante-mortem clinical characterization, we have identified key molecular signatures associated broadly with the disease, including specific microglial and astrocytic profiles. In addition, by examining brain tissue from individuals of different racial and ethnic backgrounds using single-nucleus transcriptomics, we can prioritize specific glial cell types and states that show conserved associations with AD phenotypes. Finally, using large cohort data, we also characterize putative subgroups of individuals with dementia whose molecular profiles are distinct, lending further credence to the notion of molecular subtypes of disease that may pave the way for combinatorial or precision cellular therapies.
Date: July 31st, 2025
Watch the video (available soon)
June 2025 talks
Presenter: Dr. Dr. Fiona Coutts - Kings College, London
Topic: From data to decisions in psychiatry: developing implementable AI for real-world treatment guidance
Bio: Dr. Fiona Coutts is a postdoctoral researcher in the Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health Lab at King’s College London. Her research applies Artificial Intelligence methods to clinical, blood-based, and neuroimaging data to understand treatment outcomes in psychosis and depression. She aims to develop clinically implementable decision-support tools for personalised psychiatric care.
Date: June 23rd, 2025
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Presenter: Dr. Richard Gao - Tübingen AI Center
Topic: Accelerating discovery of data-driven models and theories of neural dynamics
Bio: Richard studied at UofT (Engineering Science), specializing in biomedical engineering. He obtained his PhD with Bradley Voytek in Cognitive Science at UCSD, receiving an NSERC CGS Fellowship and the Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal. He then joined the ML in Science Group as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow under Jakob Macke at the Tübingen AI Center, developing mechanistic and generative models of neural dynamics.
Date: June 19th, 2025
Watch the video (available soon)
Presenter: Dr. Ariel Rokem - Washington University
Topic: Neuroimaging data analysis in the age of AI
BIO: Ariel Rokem (https://arokem.org) received a PhD in neuroscience from UC Berkeley (2010) and postdoctoral training at Stanford (2011 - 2015). He was a Data Scientist at the University of Washington eScience Institute (2015-2020), before joining the Department of Psychology in 2020, where he leads a neuroinformatics-focused R&D group (https://neuroinformatics.uw.edu).
Abstract: Neuroimaging data contains enormous amounts of information about brain structure and function. To address the challenges of neuroimaging data analysis -- the high dimensionality of the data, the scale of modern neuroimaging datasets, and its inherent complexity, we use a range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. In our hands, these methods enable scalable research pipelines, uncover complex relationships in data, and extract new kinds of biological information from existing data. I will demonstrate these applications of AI with a few projects that my group has executed in the last few years. One of the challenges of these methods is their lack of transparency and interpretability, and I will also show how we address these challenges using methods for AI interpretation. Finally, new AI models and methods promise to represent generalizable knowledge about brain structure and function that can be applied to many different questions. I will discuss ongoing and future work that aims to deliver on this promise.
Date: June 18th, 2025
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Presenter: Dr. Elvisha Dhamala - Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
Topic: Leveraging Brain-Based Predictive Models for Precision Psychiatry: From Big Data to Individual Outcomes
BIO: Dr. Elvisha Dhamala directs the Brain-Based Predictive Modeling Lab at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. Her research leverages large-scale neuroimaging datasets and advanced machine learning approaches to develop computational models that predict psychiatric risk and behavioral phenotypes. Her work aims to understand neurobiological signatures of mental health to advance personalized intervention strategies.
Date: June 12th, 2025
Watch the video (available soon)
May 2025 talk
Presenter: Dr. Gregory Kiar - Child Mind Institute
Topic: Messy measurements and the opportunities they provide in mental health
BIO: Gregory Kiar, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Data Analytics Innovation and Rigor (DAIR) and a Research Scientist on the Senior Scientist (Tenure-Equivalent) Track at the Child Mind Institute. With a background in Biomedical Engineering, Greg has developed techniques to study a variety of forms of biosignal data, including developing turnkey tools to estimate brain connectivity maps and platforms to assess the numerical stability of neuroscience findings. Greg has extensive experience in computational statistics, uncertainty quantification, pipeline development, and machine learning. His work seeks to inform decision-making for robust data collection, signal processing, and biomarker discovery both in clinical and research environments, with a priority on techniques that can be applied in naturalistic settings. Altogether, Greg works to improve the trustworthiness of the techniques we use to study the brain and mental health, and make them as accessible and widely usable as possible.
Greg is a long-time advocate of open science; he has organized dozens of hackathon-style events focused on training and collaboration and has taught several university-level courses. He frequently serves as a mentor, where he teaches academic writing, fundamental computational skills, data science techniques, and best practices in reproducible research.
Date: May 14th, 2025
Watch the video (available soon)
April 2025 talk
Presenter: Dr. Justin Baker - McLean Institute for Technology - Harvard University
Topic: A conversation with Dr. Justin Baker, Scientific Director of the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry
BIO: Justin T. Baker, MD, PhD, is the scientific director of the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry and director of the Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging & Bioinformatics at McLean Hospital. He is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Baker’s research uses both large-scale studies and deep, multilevel phenotyping approaches to understand the nature and underlying biology of mental illnesses. He is a clinical psychiatrist with expertise in schizophrenia and bipolar spectrum disorders and other disorders of emerging adulthood. In 2016, Dr. Baker co-founded the Institute for Technology in Psychiatry (ITP), a first-of-its-kind research and development center to foster tool development and novel applications of consumer technology in psychiatric research and care delivery.
Presenter: Dr. Xiaosi Gu currently Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and Director of Center for Computational Psychiatry at Mount Sinai. Topic: The social brain: from models to mental health
Presenter: Dr. Rebecca Hodge joined the Allen Institute as a Scientist II in the Human Cell Types program in March of 2014. She is currently an Assistant Investigator and co-lead of genomics projects at the Institute. Topic: Mapping the human cerebral cortex using single nucleus RNA-sequencing Watch the video
August 2021 talk
Presenter: Associate Professor Dr. Marta Garrido leads the Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry Laboratory at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, at The University of Melbourne, and is Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function. Topic: From sensory prediction errors to computational psychiatry Watch the video
May 2021 talk
Presenter: Blake Richards is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University and a Core Faculty Member at Mila. Topic: A single self-supervised loss function can explain specialized pathways in mouse visual cortex Watch the video
April 2021 talk
Presenter: Dr. Joel Zylberberg is Associate Fellow of Learning in Machines and Brains at CIFAR, Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute for AI, and Canada Research Chair in Computational Neuroscience at York University. Topic: Learning from unexpected events in the neocortical microcircuit Watch the video
March 2021 talk
Presenter: Dr. Petra Ritter heads the Brain Simulation Section at the Dept. of Neurology, Charité and Berlin Institute of Health. Topic: The Virtual Brain Cloud Watch the video
February 2021 talk
Presenter: Dr. Joana Cabral is a Biomedical Engineer with a PhD in Computational Neuroscience. She is currently a researcher at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute in Portugal. Topic: Dynamic Behaviour of Brain Network States Watch the video
January 2021 talk
Presenter: Dr. Lori Chibnik is a biostatistician and Assistant Professor with an appointment in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Topic: Tackling disparities in genetics research: Building the research and researchers together Watch the video
2020
December 2020 talk
Presenter: Dr. Frances Skinner, Senior Scientist, Krembil Brain Institute Division of Clinical and Computational Neuroscience, Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network. Professor, University of Toronto. Topic: A modeling story of two brain cells Watch the video
November 2020 talk
Presenter: Dr. Stephanie R. Jones, Associate Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Brown University. Topic: Biophysically Principled Neural Modeling of EEG to Guide Interpretation and Design of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation. Watch the video
October 2020 talk
Presenter: Dr. Philip De Jager, Weil-Granat Professor of Neurology, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain and the Columbia Precision Medicine Initiative, Columbia University Irving Medical Center Topic: Cell population structure of the aging brain: Towards a high-resolution perspective of human neurodegeneration Watch the video
September 2020 talk
Presenter: Dr. John Murray, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University Topic: Large-scale gradients across human cortex: computational modeling, neuroimaging and transcriptomics Watch the video
August 2020 talk
Presenter: Dr. Justin Baker, Scientific Director, McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry, and Director, Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics, McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Topic: Sensing Psychosis: Toward Computational Phenotypes in Severe Mental Illness Watch the video
July 2020 talk
Presenter: Dr. Gaute Einevoll, Professor of Physics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Oslo Topic: Towards multipurpose biophysics-based mathematical models of cortical circuits Watch the video
Inaugural talk - June 2020
Presenter: Dr. Sean Hill, Director, Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics Topic: A multiscale perspective on brain health: from genes to behaviour and populations Watch the video
