Welcome to the first post of our Neuroscientist of the Month series! This month, we introduce Giulia Baracchini, a PhD candidate at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University working with Prof. Nathan Spreng.
Her research focuses on understanding how macroscale brain dynamics may be altered in healthy aging and in preclinical Alzheimer’s (AD) populations, and how such alterations may be linked to cognitive decline. Specifically, her work builds on existing knowledge that aging is a manifestation of disruptions in how brain regions communicate with each other, and that AD pathology preferentially spreads via inter-regional connections. To investigate macroscale brain dynamics, she uses two fMRI-based measures: BOLD signal variability and functional connectivity.
Giulia recently published her first first-author paper in NeuroImage, where she demonstrated how similarities in BOLD signal variability patterns between region pairs are associated with the strength of their functional connections (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811921004262?via%3Dihub).
Her full bio can be found at https://www.womensneuronet.com/team/giulia-baracchini.