Abstract

This talk is part of the Cambridge Clinical Neuroscience and Mental Health Symposium, 29th – 30th September 2009 at West Road Concert Hall. This event is free to attend for cambridge neuroscientists although registration is required. To register, and for further information, please visit: http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/cnmhs/

Abstract: Recent developments in the statistical physics of complex networks can be translated to an understanding of the brain’s structural and functional networks at many scales of space and time, and in different species [1]. I will discuss how network analysis based on graph theory has been used to explore small-world, hierarchical, modular and cost-efficient topological architectures in human brain networks derived from structural and functional MRI and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data. In the context of this technical background, I will review work that has linked brain network organization to cognitive function and has identified disease-related abnormalities in network configuration that are compatible with the concept of schizophrenia as a syndrome of dysconnectivity in large-scale brain networks [2].

Biosketch: Ed Bullmore trained in medicine at Oxford (BA 1981) and St Bartholomew’s Hospital London (MBBS 1985). He was a Lecturer in Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (MRCP 1989) before starting clinical training in Psychiatry at St George’s Hospital and the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals, London (MRCPsych 1993). From 1993, his research training was supported by the Wellcome Trust at the Institute of Psychiatry in London; he completed a PhD in statistical analysis of magnetic resonance imaging in 1997. Since 1999, he has been a Professor of Psychiatry and a founding Director of CAMEO , an award-winning service for first episode psychosis in Cambridge. Since 2005 he has been Clinical Director of the Wellcome Trust and MRC -funded Behavioural & Clinical Neurosciences Institute and has worked half-time for GlaxoSmithKline as Vice-President, Experimental Medicine and Head, Clinical Unit Cambridge. Ed Bullmore has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and his research on brain networks has largely been supported by a Human Brain Project grant from the National Institutes of Health. In 2008, he was elected FMedSci and, in 2009, FRC Psych.