Join this talented team! 🧠✨ Click on post below for details.

Come join our awesome team 😎

We're hiring! FT research assistant @ UT Dallas

Join our team to work on a longitudinal neuroimaging study of midlife brain aging.

Strong opportunity for those interested in brain networks, aging, and Alzheimer’s disease risk.

App. deadline May 6.

Details: jobs.utdallas.edu/postings/31680

𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬
I am thrilled to announce an editorial collaboration between 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 and 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐬.
With @bartolomuccilab.bsky.social, I am co-editing a virtual special issue focused on:
𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴-𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Peiying Liu, Hanzhang Lu, et al:

Non-invasive MRI of choroid plexus vascular function

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

White matter pathways mediating dorsolateral prefrontal TMS therapy for depression

New @natneuro.nature.com paper led by Caio Seguin, Robin Cash, and Andrew Zalesky.

We map (indirect) pathways from DLPFC to SGC and link individual variation with response efficacy.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Small/Working Group Meetings | Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging Research Network The Research Network is pleased to offer grants for small/working group meetings with the aim of facilitating collaboration among Network members and affiliates and prospective Network members. These…

Can't wait for our individual RFAs to open this summer?

We now offer Small/Working Group Meeting grants on a rolling basis! If you have an idea for a meeting topic relevant to network interests, click the link below for more information!

PNAS: Correspondence of large-scale functional brain network decline across aging mice and humans
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.252...

That's home. That's us.

This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew.

Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right.

Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

Full thread with more details: bsky.app/profile/gaga...

Humans live many more years than mice, but our brain networks are aging much faster.

Brain network decline follows a common trajectory across mouse and human adulthood, with features of network organization linked to more rapid decline.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How do we define "good" fMRI data? Especially with resting state, there are circularity risks if we evaluate data quality as showing the networks we expect to see. Javier Gonzalez-Castillo (& me & others) developed pBOLD, a new metric that uses multi-echo info. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/8

We’re excited to share a summary thread from the Wig Neuroimaging Lab on their latest PNAS publication.
Explore the key findings below ⬇️

"These findings point to a general process of functional dedifferentiation over adulthood, occurring at multiple levels of neural organization, from neurons to whole-brain networks."

absolutely!

Correspondence of large-scale functional brain network decline across aging mice and humans | PNAS Human aging is marked by progressive reorganization of large-scale functional brain networks; these brain network changes have been linked to cogni...

🎉Huge congratulations to McEwen fellow @ewinternelson.bsky.social and Dr. Gagan Wig of UT Dallas on their recent publication in PNAS on large-scale brain network decline across aging mice and humans and its translational relevance. Read the paper here:

shorturl.at/gjau5

The first part of my PhD research is out now in PNAS! See the thread below and stay tuned for my dissertation work, which builds on this cross-species model of brain network aging

By analyzing brain activity throughout the lives of mice, Itamar Kahn, Gagan Wig, Ezra Winter-Nelson & team found that the rodent’s brain ages similarly to that of a human. Studying mice could therefore be a way to learn about how our brains decline as we grow old.

@pnas.org

tinyurl.com/38xwm5hv

Education vs. brain network decline & AD prognosis: Chan et al., Nature Aging 2021

AD-specific network alterations: Zhang et al., J Neuroscience 2023

Reliability of the measure: Han et al., Cerebral Cortex 2024

For those who want to dig into the background on system segregation and aging in humans, here are some key papers from my lab:

System segregation across the adult lifespan: Chan et al., PNAS 2014

System segregation review: Wig, TICS 2017

SES stratification: Chan et al., PNAS 2018

cont.

Huge congratulations to lead author @ewinternelson.bsky.social who drove the project and a fantastic team including co-senior author Itamar Kahn, whose group did the mouse imaging

@utdallas.bsky.social @cvlneuro.bsky.social @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social

On methods: mice were imaged at rest while awake, with dense longitudinal sampling. Pipelines matched to human studies & findings robust across analytical choices

The data & code are openly available — links in paper

We welcome collaborators in mouse aging, longevity & cross-species brain health

Why does this matter for AD? System segregation decline is linked to AD risk and progression. Many AD drugs that work in mice fail in humans — this could be because brain *function* isn't part of the pipeline. System segregation provides a new cross-species bridge.

Intriguingly, network decline in mice parallels cellular-level changes — reduced neuronal selectivity, declining synaptic differentiation — also beginning early in adulthood. This suggests dedifferentiation across multiple levels of organization simultaneously; we’re now examining the direct links.

Mice also age *more slowly* at this network level — the rate of decline is steeper in humans even after accounting for lifespan differences.

This difference in rate of network decline is robust across a wide range of mouse-human age alignments and analytic choices.

The answer seems to be linked to long-range connectivity. Human brains have stronger connections among distant areas, particularly between different brain systems. Mice have relatively fewer of these — likely reflecting the greater integrative demands of the human brain.

But the story doesn't end there. Despite this shared pattern, the global architecture of mouse and human brain networks, and how they age, are not identical.

Mouse networks are actually *more* segregated than human networks — at every age. Why?

We directly compared mouse and human aging trajectories using a common analytical framework — 82 mice alongside 1,179 humans (ages 18-90) from the Human Connectome Project.

Both species show declining system segregation. The same aging signature, across two very different brains.

We then scanned mice from 3 to 20 months and mapped their networks. We see the same pattern as in humans: a progressive decline in system segregation.

We first verified that fMRI in awake mice captures meaningful functional organization — known circuits show expected, dissociable patterns.