Jeffrey Stanley, Ph.D. will chair and present at the Society of Biological Psychiatry's 71st annual meeting May 12-14 in Atlanta, in the symposium "Modulation of Glutamate in Task Active States in Humans: Applications to Psychiatry with Real-time Functional Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (fMRS)."
Dr. Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences. The symposium invitation highlights his innovative development of fMRS, a highly novel approach for characterizing real-time dynamics of the neurotransmitter glutamate. The technology is a complement of the more widely used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, but relies on more direct measures of the brain's neuronal function.
Glutamate is the brain's major excitatory neurotransmitter, implicated in multiple domains of behavior including learning and memory, and glutamate dysfunction is associated with neuropsychiatric illnesses including schizophrenia. Typical imaging attempts to quantitate glutamate in the brain do so in the rest state, but these basal levels do not capture how glutamate changes take place in respond to dynamic task demand. Understanding the biochemical dynamics of glutamate modulation in real time related to task-active states can further the mechanistic understanding of these disorders, and how they might related to disordered plasticity in the brain.
Dr. Stanley and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., are undertaking foundational neuroimaging studies using both fMRI and fMRS to reveal regional and brain network function and dysfunction in healthy participants and schizophrenia patients.
Several of these themes will be echoed in Dr. Stanley's presentation and by other symposium speakers at the meeting. The symposium will focus on mechanistic pathways that link glutamate modulation to neuronal activity and evidence of altered modulation of glutamate in different psychiatric disorders in response to task-specific activation.
Characterizing neurochemical dynamics is a core focus of work in the department's Brain Imaging Research Division. At the meeting, Eric Woodcock, a doctoral student in the Translational Neuroscience Program and recent National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award recipient, will present the first evidence of dynamic increases in glutamate in the prefrontal cortex during working memory. He is mentored by department Professor Mark Greenwald, Ph.D., and Drs. Diwadkar and Stanley. The initiatives highlight the complex capabilities of research in the division, and their applications to the study of brain systems in health and disease.