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Wednesday 26 February 2020 12:00 - 13:30

Health Tech Lunch - 26.02.2020, 12h00 - Sierre, Techno-Pôle (Room Atlas)

Presentation by Dr Tobias U. Hauser (University College London)

Title : Do we need a developmental computational psychiatry?

Abstract

Many psychiatric disorders arise during adolescence, a time when the brain undergoes fundamental reorganisation. However, it is unclear whether and how the emergence of mental health problems is linked to aberrant neurocognitive development. In my talk, I will discuss why it is critical to understand (aberrant) cognitive and brain development if we want to better understand how mental health problems arise. I will present findings showing how psychiatric traits are linked to adolescent brain myelination, and illustrate why computational neuroscience approaches could be important in understanding psychiatric disorders.

Bio

Tobias Hauser is a senior research associate and principal investigator at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. He is interested in the neurocomputational processes underlying learning and decision making, and how these go awry in psychiatric disorders. Tobias investigates how cognitive biases in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can help us better understand the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying this disorder. Moreover, he studies the influence of neurocognitive development on the emergence of psychiatric disorders. In his work, he combines neuroimaging, pharmacology, and computational modelling in humans with and without mental health problems. Tobias has received several prestigious prizes in psychiatry, such as the Emerging Leaders Prize in Adolescent Mental Health (2018) and the Kramer Pollnow Award (2017). His work is supported by Wellcome, Royal Society, Medical Research Foundation, Jacobs Foundation, Brain & Behavior Foundation and the Max Planck Society.

Registration : https://doodle.com/poll/t6gi7kssmzyque8m

The presentation can be followed live on Youtube (link coming soon).