Two Wayne State University School of Medicine faculty members will chair and present at symposia at the annual meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, taking place May 3-5 in Philadelphia.
Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, and Jeffrey A. Stanley, Ph.D., associate professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, will highlight pediatric neuroimaging in psychiatric disorders and the application of novel image analyses techniques for understanding the neurodevelopment bases of conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia.
"The Society of Biological Psychiatry is the most significant international meeting that is specifically devoted to questions of the biological bases of mental illness," Dr. Diwadkar said. "The symposium selection process is based on a highly competitive evaluation process by the program committee. It is significant that our group is represented so heavily."
Dr. Stanley and Dr. Diwadkar are co-directors of the Brain Research and Imaging Neuroscience Division of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at WSU.
Dr. Stanley, along with Judith Rapoport, M.D., section chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the National Institute of Mental Health, will co-chair a symposium on "Tracking developmental changes in ADHD from childhood to adolescence: Dysmaturation in cortico-striatal systems." The symposium will feature talks by: Sarah Durston, Ph.D., from the Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands, who will present "Neurobiological heterogeneity in ADHD over development;" Dr. Stanley, who will present "Neuropil dysplasticity in ADHD based on molecular/biochemical imaging;" Philip Shaw, Ph.D., from the Social and Behavioral Research Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, Md.; who will present "Mapping anomalies in cortico-striatal trajectories in ADHD using structural MRI;" and Dr. Diwadkar, who will speak on "Network dysfunction of core cortico-striatal pathways in ADHD."
Dr. Diwadkar will chair and speak in a symposium on "Network dysfunction in childhood onset schizophrenia: Neurodevelopmental and systems perspectives." The symposium will be co-chaired by Nitin Gogtay, M.D., of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the National Institute of Mental Health. That symposium will include talks by Dr. Gogtay, "Exploring neurodevelopmental networks in childhood onset schizophrenia: An overview from structural neuroimaging;" Peter Uhlhaas, Ph.D., from the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany, speaking on "A neurodevelopmental perspective on neural synchrony in schizophrenia;" Aaron Alexander Bloch, Ph.D., from the Brain Mapping Unit, Cambridge University, presenting "Brain network disturbances in childhood onset schizophrenia: Graph theoretic applications to resting state fMRI data;" and Dr. Diwadkar, who will present "Disorganized motor systems in childhood onset schizophrenia: Task based fMRI during simple and complex finger tapping."