Arts & Sciences Brain development/Law/Policy School of Medicine

NIH funds Barch research on neurodevelopment

In order to understand healthy neurodevelopment — and the threats to that health — researchers need a more comprehensive understanding of how the brain grows throughout childhood and young adulthood.

Barch

To that end, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $753,181 grant to Deanna Barch, PhD, chair and professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences as well as the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry and professor of radiology​ at the School of Medicine, all at Washington University in St. Louis.

Barch will be working with co-principal investigator Leah Somerville, professor of psychology at Harvard University, to generate an account of “typical” neurodevelopment in 5- to 21-year-olds in order to:

  • identify age versus pubertal- and hormonal-based mechanisms that undergird development in childhood and adolescence;
  • conduct systematic analysis across brain structure, function and connectivity using state-of-the-art acquisition and analysis approaches; and
  • evaluate maturational variation in multimodal coupling across brain systems/modalities as a function of development.

Originally published on The Source.