Research Themes and Interest:

During the first three years of my PhD, my work has been recognized and funded by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Discovery Fund, Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Award, and most notably, the Fulbright Fellowship.

An overview of my current research goals:

My research investigates the relationship between mental health symptoms and brain organization in children and youth anywhere from 6-18 years old. There is research to suggest that changes in brain connectivity, which are the relationships between brain different regions, underlie mental health symptoms (such as anxiety). However, a large proportion of this research has studied this relationship in children who do not have a mental health or psychiatric diagnosis (more formally called typically developing children).

I’m interested in investigating the relationship between brain connectivity and mental health symptoms in children with psychiatric or neurodevelopmental conditions to determine whether these children show the same relationship which has been found in typically developing children.

Brain-Behaviour relationships in children with Neurodevelopmental disorders:

My current PhD research focuses on investigating the relationships between brain connectivity and mental health symptoms. I am specifically interested in a brain network called the cortico-amygdalar network. This network encompasses the relationship between the amygdala and rest of the cortex. This network is important for emotional regulation and modulation of behaviour. Previous research has found that this network is implicated in several mental health conditions.

I am currently exploring the relationship between properties of the cortico-amygdalar network and mental health symptoms across children with different neurodevelopmental diagnoses, including, autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. I am also interested in examining these relationships in typically developing children. By examining this relationship in children with neurodevelopment disorders and typically developing children, I hope to be able to determine whether there brain-mental health relationships specific to children with neurodevelopment disorders or whether typically developing children also show the same relationship. For my PhD thesis, I am using publicly available datasets or data acquired from consortiums.

I use three different types of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities to construct patterns of brain connectivity at the structural and functional level. I use structural T1-weighted imaging to construct structural covariance networks which are correlations between the morphological properties of the brain. I use functional MRI to construct models of neuronal activation patterns and connectivity within specific networks. I use diffusion weighted imaging to construct properties of white matter tracts (the highways that connect different brain regions together). To measure mental health symptoms, I have used scores from the Child Behavioural Checklist. My first PhD paper explored the relationship between structural and functional connectivity properties of the cortico-amygdalar network and externalizing or internalizing behaviours in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The pre-print can be found here.