Drs. Hee Yeon Im, Deborah Giaschi and Miriam Spering Wins the 2022 DMCBH Kickstart Grants

The Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health Kickstart Grants will encourage research that shows new collaborations, directions, and technological developments. It supports new projects that generate preliminary data for future grant applications to external funding agencies.

Drs. Miriam Spering and Douglas Altshuler: Eye Movements during complex locomotion

The Accessory Optic System (AOS) is a visuomotor circuit that has an important role in stabilizing eye movements, in response to large-field visual signals known as optic flow. The AOS sends direct projections to the cerebellum and other pre-motor areas of the brain, which suggests that it is also the most likely candidate pathway for rapid, whole-body stabilizing movements. This project will form a new collaboration between the Altshuler and Spering labs for understanding how the AOS contributes to both whole body and eye movements, and how these two movement systems interact to optimize behaviour when subjected to complex optic flow.

Drs. Hee Yeong Im, Deborah Giaschi, Rebecca Todd and Daniela Palombo: Combining MEG and fMRI for multimodal functional neuroimaging in pediatric brain research

Functional neuroimaging techniques, such as functional MRI (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), are non-invasive tools to examine typical and atypical brain development, informing clinicians and researchers of possible neural anomalies. Because behavioural signs are often discovered much later than the onset of alterations in the brain, finding disrupted brain functions using neuroimaging techniques allows for identification of neurodevelopmental disorders. This project will combine MEG and fMRI to obtain temporal and spatial properties of brain activity, leveraging complementary information on when and where neural activity occurs during cognitive tasks and at rest and to develop neurocognitive biomarkers for abnormal brain development.