Translational neuroimaging strategies to better understand the pathways towards neurodevelopmental disorders: human and mouse MRI studies

Different neurodevelopmental disorders often share common risk factors, yet have complex and varied clinical manifestations, even within diagnostic categories. In my talk I will present work on how we can use large neuroimaging datasets to examine factors that influence heterogeneity (genetics, age, sex, etc) within specific neuropsychiatric disorders. I will then demonstrate how we can use experimental models to further study environmental risk factors and their influence on neuroanatomical, behavioural, and cognitive trajectories. The goal is to demonstrate how these two streams of inquiry can be used to provide complementary information regarding how similar loads of genetic and environmental risk may give rise to the significant variability consistently observed in individuals suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders.