Speaker : Hao-Ting Wang, Ph. D.
Postdoctoral researcher at Lune Bellec’s laboratory, researcher at CRIUGM
Title : Paving the way for brain-first biomarkers research for psychiatry
Summary :
Alzheimer’s disease often shares symptoms with schizophrenia, which in turn shares similar functional brain expression and genetic fingerprints with individuals on the autism spectrum. Single-disease models have limited success in capturing such transdiagnostic properties in brain activity. To test this hypothesis effectively, I want to aggregate multiple datasets that cover different conditions and the trajectory of ageing. However, integrating various fMRI datasets is a challenging task. In this talk, I will cover my work on the data processing workflow, brain-based biomarker, as well as future direction and speculations.
Biosketch:
Hao-Ting Wang is a Canadian Neuroanalytic Scholar at CRIUGM, where she works at the intersection of data science, neuroimaging, and psychiatry. Her research focuses on using AI models on fMRI data to identify transdiagnostic biomarkers in neurodegenerative conditions. She is a core developer of Nilearn, a widely used Python library for machine learning in neuroimaging. She has contributed to large-scale neuroimaging preprocessing projects involving datasets of over 40,000 participants. She is a recipient of the 2023 Neuro-Irv and Helga Cooper Open Science Prize. In addition to her research, she is active in education and outreach, co-leading workshops for Brainhack School and the Montreal AI Neuroscience initiative, and is committed to fostering inclusivity in the open science community.
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