Today our guest is Dr. Angie Laird, who trained as an imaging physicist, but has evolved into a cognitive neuroscientist and a true pioneer in meta-analysis of fMRI data. Dr. Laird has spent the bulk of her career developing novel data analysis algorithms, neuroscience informatics tools, and neuroimaging ontologies to yield analytic strategies for improving investigations into functional brain networks of healthy individuals as well as in populations with psychiatric and neurologic diseases and disorders. Early on she has seen the untapped value in meta-analysis, and has fostered growth in this fundamentally important area in functional brain imaging.

Dr. Laird received her B.S. in Physics from Florida State University in 1998, and her Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002. She was a faculty member at the Research Imaging Institute of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio from 2004-2012, and currently she is Professor and Director for Imaging Science at Florida International University in Miami. Along with her development of meta-analysis tools and her own research, she plays a central role in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) consortium which is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States.

This was a great conversation that spanned the early culture of fMRI research, early efforts towards data sharing, to the current practices today where data sharing and analyzing data across studies and from large shared datasets is becoming the norm. We also spent time talking about the origin, logistics, and impact of the ABCD project.

We hope you enjoy it!

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Xuqian Michelle Li