Paul Thompson (neuroscientist)

Last updated
Paul Thompson
Born (1971-06-13) 13 June 1971 (age 53)
Alma materOxford University
University of California, Los Angeles
Known forENIGMA Project
Scientific career
FieldsNeuroscience
InstitutionsUniversity of Southern California
Website USC/Paul Thompson

Paul Thompson (born 13 June 1971) is a British-American neuroscientist, and a professor of neurology at the Imaging Genetics Center at the University of Southern California. [1] [2] Thompson obtained a bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin languages and mathematics[ citation needed ] from Oxford University. He also earned a master's degree in mathematics from Oxford and a PhD degree in neuroscience from University of California, Los Angeles. [3]

Contents

Thompson specializes in the field of human brain imaging, with research interest in mathematical and computational algorithm development for human brain mapping, and has contributed to more than 900 publications. [4] He currently leads the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) project, a global data collection and sharing effort designed to understand how brain structure changes during the trajectory of brain atrophy, mental illness and Alzheimer's disease and the underlying genetic landscape. [5] [6]

Research

The ENIGMA Consortium, co-founded by Thompson, performs some of the largest-ever studies of the human brain, analyzing brain scans of more than 50,000 people worldwide. This collaborative group studies 22 brain diseases in 37 countries, focusing on the interaction between brain health and genetics. ENIGMA has published some of the largest-ever neuroimaging studies of schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, autism spectrum disorder, and obsessive–compulsive disorder. [7]

In 2020, Thompson launched AI4AD, a consortium of researchers across the United States that aims to develop AI tools to analyze and integrate genetic, imaging and cognitive data relating to Alzheimer’s disease. [8]

In 2023, Thompson launched the India ENIGMA Initiative, a study of factors that affect brain aging and mental health in India. [9] [10]

Academic career

Thompson began his academic career as an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after completing his PhD in neuroscience as a Fulbright Scholar at UCLA. During his time at UCLA, Thompson was promoted to professor in 2010.

In 2013, Thompson moved to the University of Southern California (USC), [11] where he was named director of the USC Imaging Genetics Center and associate director of the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute. [12] He is also a professor in the Keck School of Medicine of USC departments of ophthalmology, neurology, psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, radiology and engineering.

Awards

In 2023, Thompson received the 2023 Pioneer in Medicine Award from the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics. [13]

Impact

Thompson has been named one of “the world’s most influential scientific minds” and a highly cited researcher by Thomson Reuters. In March 2022, he was ranked as the number 181 most cited researcher worldwide based on his whole career h-index of 188 (based on Google Scholar). [14]

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to neuroscience:

Neuroimaging is a medical technique that allows doctors and researchers to take pictures of the inner workings of the body or brain of a patient. It can show areas with heightened activity, areas with high or low blood flow, the structure of the patients brain/body, as well as certain abnormalities. Neuroimaging is most often used to find the specific location of certain diseases or birth defects such as tumors, cancers, or clogged arteries. Neuroimaging first came about as a medical technique in the 1880s with the invention of the human circulation balance and has since lead to other inventions such as the x-ray, air ventriculography, cerebral angiography, PET/SPECT scans, magnetoencephalography, and xenon CT scanning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience</span> Research institution in London, England

The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) is a centre for mental health and neuroscience research, education and training in Europe. It is dedicated to understanding, preventing and treating mental illness, neurological conditions, and other conditions that affect the brain. The IoPPN is a faculty of King's College London, England, and was previously known as the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP).

Imaging genetics refers to the use of anatomical or physiological imaging technologies as phenotypic assays to evaluate genetic variation. Scientists that first used the term imaging genetics were interested in how genes influence psychopathology and used functional neuroimaging to investigate genes that are expressed in the brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neuroimaging</span> Set of techniques to measure and visualize aspects of the nervous system

Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Increasingly it is also being used for quantitative research studies of brain disease and psychiatric illness. Neuroimaging is highly multidisciplinary involving neuroscience, computer science, psychology and statistics, and is not a medical specialty. Neuroimaging is sometimes confused with neuroradiology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan J. Stein</span> South African psychiatrist

Dan Joseph Stein is a South African psychiatrist who is a professor and Chair of the Dept of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, and Director of the South African MRC Unit on Risk & Resilience in Mental Disorders. Stein was the Director of UCT's early Brain and Behaviour Initiative, and was the inaugural Scientific Director of UCT's later Neuroscience Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the United States, and at Aarhus University in Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Brain Research Centre</span>

National Brain Research Centre is a research institute in Manesar, Gurugram, India. It is an autonomous institute under the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. The institute is dedicated to research in neuroscience and brain functions in health and diseases using multidisciplinary approaches. This is the first autonomous institute by DBT to be awarded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, formerly known as the Ministry of Human Resource Development, in May 2002. NBRC was dedicated to the nation by the Honorable President of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in December 2003. The founder chairman of NBRC Society is Prof. Prakash Narain Tandon, whereas the founder director Prof. Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath was followed by Prof. Subrata Sinha and Prof. Neeraj Jain. The current director of NBRC is Prof. Krishanu Ray.

The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior is a research institute of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). It includes a number of centers, including the "Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics", which uses DNA sequencing, gene expression studies, bioinformatics, and the genetic manipulation of model organisms to understand brain and behavioral phenotypes.

Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a multisite study that aims to improve clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This cooperative study combines expertise and funding from the private and public sector to study subjects with AD, as well as those who may develop AD and controls with no signs of cognitive impairment. Researchers at 63 sites in the US and Canada track the progression of AD in the human brain with neuroimaging, biochemical, and genetic biological markers. This knowledge helps to find better clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of AD. ADNI has made a global impact, firstly by developing a set of standardized protocols to allow the comparison of results from multiple centers, and secondly by its data-sharing policy which makes available all at the data without embargo to qualified researchers worldwide. To date, over 1000 scientific publications have used ADNI data. A number of other initiatives related to AD and other diseases have been designed and implemented using ADNI as a model. ADNI has been running since 2004 and is currently funded until 2021.

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a five-year project sponsored by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, split between two consortia of research institutions. The project was launched in July 2009 as the first of three Grand Challenges of the NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. On September 15, 2010, the NIH announced that it would award two grants: $30 million over five years to a consortium led by Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota, with strong contributions from University of Oxford (FMRIB) and $8.5 million over three years to a consortium led by Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California Los Angeles.

Anders Martin Dale is a prominent neuroscientist and professor of radiology, neurosciences, psychiatry, and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and is one of the world's leading developers of sophisticated computational neuroimaging techniques. He is the founding Director of the Center for Multimodal Imaging Genetics (CMIG) at UCSD.

Mark Steven Cohen is an American neuroscientist and early pioneer of functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance imaging. He is a currently a professor of psychiatry, neurology, radiology, psychology, biomedical physics, and biomedical engineering at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is also a performing musician.

Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems. Friston is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. In imaging neuroscience he is best known for statistical parametric mapping and dynamic causal modelling. Friston also acts as a scientific advisor to numerous groups in industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Resting state fMRI</span> Type of functional magnetic resonance imaging

Resting state fMRI is a method of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that is used in brain mapping to evaluate regional interactions that occur in a resting or task-negative state, when an explicit task is not being performed. A number of resting-state brain networks have been identified, one of which is the default mode network. These brain networks are observed through changes in blood flow in the brain which creates what is referred to as a blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal that can be measured using fMRI.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to brain mapping:

Nihar Ranjan Jana is an Indian neuroscientist and professor at the IIT Kharagpur, known for his studies on E3 ubiquitin ligases, protein homeostasis and neurodegenerative disorders. Jana is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, in 2008 and TATA Innovation Fellowship in 2014 for his contributions to Neurodegenerative diseases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur W. Toga</span>

Arthur W. Toga is an American neuroscientist and the director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) and the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute within the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He is also the Ghada Irani Chair in Neuroscience and provost professor of ophthalmology, neurology, psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, radiology and engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rahul Desikan</span> Indian-American neuroscientist and neuroradiologist (1978–2019)

Rahul Desikan was an Indian-American neuroscientist and neuroradiologist. He was an Assistant Professor of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging, Neurology and Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-director of Laboratory for Precision Neuroimaging. Desikan's achievements became publicly known in a Washington Post article detailing his lifelong commitment to preventing and treating Alzheimer's disease and his continuing work as a scientist living with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Desikan was vocal about the need for increased awareness and research funding for ALS, and voiced his unique perspective as both ALS researcher and ALS patient in op-ed articles appearing in a regular column in the Washington Post as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle and Scientific American.

Susan Y. Bookheimer is a professor of clinical neuroscience at UCLA School of Medicine. She is best known for her work developing brain imaging techniques to help patients with Alzheimer's disease, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, brain tumors, and epilepsy.

References

  1. Totten, Sanden (May 10, 2013). "Brain transplant: UCLA's LONI neuro imaging lab is moving to USC". www.scpr.org/. KPCC. Retrieved 9 October 2014.
  2. Gordon, Larry and, Brown, Erin (May 10, 2013). "USC steals 2 star brain researchers from UCLA". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 9 October 2014.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. "LONI People". loni.usc.edu. Laboratory of Neuroimaging.
  4. "Paul Thompson/Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Google Scholar. Retrieved 9 October 2014.
  5. Pappas, Stephanie (April 16, 2012). "Genes Tied To IQ, Brain Size In UCLA ENIGMA Study". huffingtonpost.com. Huffington Post. Retrieved 9 October 2014.
  6. Thompson, Paul M.; Neale, Benjamin M.; Jahanshad, Neda; Medland, Sarah E. (June 2014). "Imaging Consortia". Nature Neuroscience. 17 (6): 791–800. doi:10.1038/nn.3718. PMC   4300949 . PMID   24866045.
  7. "The world's largest set of brain scans are helping reveal the workings of the mind and how diseases ravage the brain". Science | AAAS. 2018-01-23. Retrieved 2018-04-05.
  8. "AI that reads brain scans shows promise for finding Alzheimer's genes, Nature, November 10, 2023".
  9. "Nimhans ties up with US varsity for brain-ageing project, Deccan Herald, February 20, 2023".
  10. "Delving into the Mysteries of the Brain, Bangalore Mirror, February 25, 2023".
  11. "Renowned scientists lead cluster hire of new Trojans - USC News". news.usc.edu. 2013-05-10. Retrieved 2018-04-07.
  12. "$50 million gift names the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute - USC News". news.usc.edu. 2015-03-25. Retrieved 2018-04-07.
  13. "Leading Brain Mapping Scientists, Senator Chris Murphy, Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, and Doctors from Ukraine amongst award recipients of the 20th Annual Gathering for Cure (GFC) Gala of the World Brain Mapping Foundation".
  14. "Highly Cited Researchers (H>100) according to their Google Scholar Citations public profiles | Ranking Web of Universities: More than 28000 institutions ranked".