For our Neuroscientist of the Month this March, we introduce Dr Laura Han, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne and Orygen, working with Associate Professor Lianne Schmaal in the MaPP (Mood and Anxiety, Profiling and Prediction) lab in Australia.
During her PhD, Laura developed machine learning models using biological data (e.g., brain scans or omics) from large-scale population cohorts, and applied these models to clinical datasets to identify factors contributing to biological aging in depression.
Using big data and team science, she developed a “brain age” algorithm (https://www.photon-ai.com/enigma_brainage) to examine genetic and environmental factors underlying age-related brain patterns. This ongoing work is a collaborative effort with the ENIGMA Consortium and the Medical Machine Learning Lab in Münster, Germany.
She is currently funded by the Dutch Rubicon grant to further evaluate whether adolescent "brain age" predicts functioning, disease severity, and treatment response in young persons with mood and anxiety disorders.
Laura is the 2022 Social Media Manager for the Biological Psychiatry Australia Early Career Researchers Network (BPA ECRN), facilitating professional development and networking opportunities for Early Career Researchers working on the intersection of biology and psychiatry.
She is also a guest editor for the upcoming Research Topic of Women in Psychiatry 2022: Computational Psychiatry hosted by Dr. Lianne Schmaal, Dr. Xi Zhu & Dr. Danai Dima for Frontiers in Psychiatry.