Dr. Ravi Menon, Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging, Physics and Psychiatry at Western University, Canada

Abstract:

Marmosets are small New World primates that could become an important preclinical animal model for studying human brain diseases. A critical step in the development of marmosets as a viable model for human brain dysfunction is to characterize brain networks that are homologous with human network topologies. It’s also important to understand if these network topologies are shared with rodents, the model in which the vast majority of preclinical work has been performed to date. I will review our MRI developments that have allowed us to develop awake, behaving marmoset imaging at 9.4T.  I’ll then discuss some results from awake fMRI studies of these animals including recent work where we compare whole-brain functional connectivity fingerprinting of the medial frontal cortex (MFC) in rodents, marmosets and humans. We observe a remarkably similar intrinsic functional organization of the MFC across the three species, but clear differences between rodent and primate MFC whole-brain connectivity. In contrast to the common proposal that the rat MFC is functionally analogous with the primate lateral (LFC), our results demonstrate clear differences between the rodent MFC and primate LFC interareal functional connectivity. This cautions the use of rodents for behaviours and disorders involving the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in humans.

Bio:

Dr. Ravi Menon is a Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging, Physics and Psychiatry at Western University, where he is also a member of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience and the Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering and Founding Director of Western’s Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (CFMM), Canada’s only ultra-high field MRI facility. He holds a Ph.D. in Medicine from the University of Alberta (1990), a M.Sc.(A) in Medical Physics from McGill University and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Physics from the University of British Columbia. He did his postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Kamil Ugurbil at the University of Minnesota. He was awarded one of the inaugural Canada Research Chairs in 2001.  He has held grants from a broad spectrum of national and international funding agencies including a CIHR Foundation Grant in 2016. He currently serves as co-Scientific Director of BrainsCAN, a $66M grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.

He is twice an awardee of Canada’s Top 40 under 40 program and one of 20 recipients of the Young Explorers Medal from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2015, he was elected as a Senior Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. In 2019 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

He has served in numerous advisory capacities, including 7 years on the Canada Gairdner Foundation and the Board of Scientific Councilors of NIMH/NIH. He served for 7 years (the last 4 as Chair) on the Institute Advisory Board of the Institute for Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction of the CIHR. He currently serves on the Board of the Brain Canada Foundation along with several of Canada’s leading Philanthropists.

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Speaker

Dr. Ravi Menon, Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging, Physics and Psychiatry at Western University, Canada