About Us
We study how complex neural systems shape behavior and cognition, and how dysfunction in these systems tracks the emergence of psychopathology
About SNaP Lab
We seek a deep understanding of the pathways linking brain networks to behavior and psychopathology. Achieving this understanding requires multidisciplinary research aiming to understand how cognition, behavior, and psychopathology emerge from the dynamic interactions between brain regions and how those interactions change across development.
At SNaP Lab, we address specific questions relevant to this intersection of psychiatry and brain sciences: How do we improve the predictive models that link structure, function, and disease? How do we tease apart the brain markers that are specific to certain axes of psychiatric disorder from those that are general across disorders? How do we integrate our understanding of psychopathology with underlying neurodevelopmental processes to understand the root causes of mental illness? We probe these and related questions through the analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal neuroimaging data that we model with network analysis and machine learning.
The schematic below illustrates the three arms of our research program that cut across the aforementioned research questions.
Meet the Team
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Principal Investigator
Linden Parkes
Dr Parkes is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Rutgers Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research and the director of SNaP Lab. Linden earned his PhD from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) working with Murat Yucel, Alex Fornito, and Ben Fulcher. Linden completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania working with Dani S. Bassett and Theodore D. Satterthwaite.
Lab Members
Ahmad Beyh
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Ahmad Beyh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the SNaP Lab at CAHBIR, Rutgers University. Ahmad completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology at the American University of Beirut and earned a Masters and PhD from King's College London working with Marco Catani, Flavio Dell’Acqua, and Dominic ffytche. Before joining SNaP Lab, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London working with Semir Zeki. Ahmad's work has focused on the connectivity and function of the healthy and injured brain in the context of visuospatial learning, motion and color perception in the Riddoch syndrome, and neuroaesthetics.
Amber Howell
Postdoctoral Fellow
Amber is a postdoctoral fellow co-mentored by Linden Parkes and Avram Holmes at CAHBIR. Amber completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, she was a research assistant at UC-Davis and Stanford University. She then completed her graduate studies at Yale University, where her dissertation work focused on thalamocortical circuitry in human and non-human primates. Amber is interested in how dynamic brain interactions arise from the structural architecture of the brain and how they are shaped by subcortical circuitry, using empirical and computational tools to bridge scales of analysis and integrate findings across species. Furthermore, she is interested in how dynamic brain patterns vary across individuals and how they relate to flexible cognition and behavior in typically and atypically-developing individuals.
Collaborators
We are fortunate to work with a broad network of fantastic collaborators
