Research Team
Betsy Schaefer
Michael Mackinley
Biography: Michael coordinates the recruitment for our TOPSY study. He is also pursuing the neurobiological determinants of poor functional outcomes in psychosis.
Roberto Limongi
Biography: Roberto is an experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. Currently he works on mathematical models (dynamic causal models) of ultra-high field (7T) fMRI within the context of predictive coding and active inference. He pursues the description of the relationship between the effective connectivity of small (two or three nodes) neural networks and clinical symptoms of psychosis
- Investigating Aberrant Sensory Precision Using Functional Connectivity and Hierarchical Generative Models in High and Ultra-high-field fMRI
Angélica M. Silva
Biography: Angélica is a postdoctoral scientist working on linguistic and educational challenges in schizophrenia. Experienced in oral and written assessments, psycholinguistic analysis, and experimental designs applied to neuropsychiatric and healthy populations. Currently, she focuses on language disturbances in schizophrenia analysing syntax, semantic, and pragmatic speech data using computational linguistics, dynamic causal, and mixed-effects models.
Peter Jeon
Biography: Peter is currently a graduate student in the Medical Biophysics department working with 7-Tesla functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS). He is investigating the behaviours of glutamate changes in response to a functional task for individuals entering first-episode psychosis and healthy volunteers. By tracking glutamate dynamics in these individuals over various follow-up time points, the goal is to see if glutamate can be an effective early marker for distinguishing treatment-resistant schizophrenia.
Niron Sukumar
Biography: Niron is a fourth year medical student at Western University, hoping to specialize in psychiatry. His research is mainly focused on studying the regional differences in cerebral blood flow (CBF) and cerebral glucose metabolic rate (CMRglu) in the brains of patients with schizophrenia as compared to healthy controls. Currently, he is conducting a meta-analytic investigation of studies that have used Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) or Fluorodeoxyglucose-18 Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) to study these differences individually.
Kishore Basu
Jami Kronick
Taj Brar
Biography: Taj is a second year medical student at the Schulich School of Medicine, Windsor Campus. He holds a BSc in Biology & Chemistry from Wilfrid Laurier University, a BA in History from Ryerson University, and a MA in History from the University of Toronto. Taj's research seeks to better understand the neurological mechanisms of Formal Thought Disorder, by connecting linguistic analysis of disordered speech in schizophrenic patients to altered neuronal connectivity using resting state fMRI images.
