Upcoming Seminar
Prof. Hugh Garavan
University of Vermont
22/04/24 @ 2pm
San Francesco Complex – Sagrestia
Join at imt.lu/sagrestia
Causes and consequences of cannabis use on adolescent brain development
Leveraging approximately ten years of prospective longitudinal data on 704 participants from the IMAGEN sample (https://imagen-project.org/), I will discuss the effects of adolescent versus young adult cannabis initiation on MRI-assessed cortical thickness development and behaviour. Associations between adolescent cannabis use (14-19 years) and cortical thickness change were observed primarily in dorso-and ventrolateral portions of the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, cannabis initiation occurring between 19 and 22 years of age was associated with thickness change in temporal and cortical midline areas. Of note, brain changes related to adolescent use persisted into young adulthood and mediated the association between adolescent cannabis use and past-month cocaine, ecstasy, and cannabis use at age 22. In contrast, the extent of cannabis initiation during young adulthood (from 19-22 years) had an indirect effect on psychotic symptoms at age 22 through thickness change in temporal areas. These results suggest that the developmental timing of cannabis exposure may have a marked effect on neuroanatomical correlates of cannabis use as well as on associated behavioural sequelae.
Visiting Professors
Gregory
Maio
University of Bath
Professor of Psychology
Gregory R. Maio, Ph.D., became interested in social psychology, and values-attitude-behavior processes in particular, as an undergraduate student at York University (Canada), graduating in 1991. He went on to complete a Masters thesis and a PhD dissertation on value-attitude-behaviour processes under the guidance of Prof. James M. Olson at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), where his dissertation, Values as Truisms, received a Governor-General Gold Medal and an American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award. In 1997, he joined Cardiff University, Wales, where he received the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2002) for his early career research and was granted a Personal Chair (i.e., Professorship) in Psychology (2004). He moved to the University of Bath in 2016, where he is currently Head of the Department of Psychology.
Hugh
Garavan
University of Vermont
Professor of Psychiatry,
Professor of Psychology
Dr. Hugh Garavan is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He received his PhD in cognitive Psychology from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University and the Medical College of Wisconsin. His research uses structural and functional neuroimaging to study cognitive control and reward processes with a particular interest in how functional changes in these systems may contribute to addiction. In addition to studying current abusers of numerous drugs, he has researched the importance of cognitive control systems for successful drug abstinence. His primary research focus of the last few years has been risk factors for drug use during adolescence and he is a co-investigator on the IMAGEN project, a longitudinal neuroimaging-genetic study of over 2,000 teens. Dr. Garavan is a member of several professional societies, has served as secretary for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, has been a reviewer for the NIH, several European grant-giving agencies, and over 50 journals. He has published almost 200 papers in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and addiction.
Past Visiting Professors
Russ Poldrack
Stanford University
Professor of Psychology and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience. His research uses brain imaging to understand how we learn and make decisions and how we exert self-control. Some projects he developed are Cognitive Atlas and OpenfMRI.
Leah Krubitzer
University of California, Davis
American neuroscientist, Professor of Psychology and head of the Laboratory of Evolutionary Neurobiology. Her research interests center on how complex brains in mammals (e.g., humans) evolve from simpler forms.
Past Seminars
Pieter Roelfsma
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
James Haxby
Dartmouth College
Jody Culham
Western University
Hans Op de Beeck
KU Leuven
Michael Hanke
Forschungszentrum Jülich