Alexander Li Cohen
drdrxanderli.bsky.social
Alexander Li Cohen
@drdrxanderli.bsky.social
ChildNeurologist @BostonChildrens @HarvardMed. Using network imaging to understand/develop new therapies for #autism symptoms. @NIMHgov K23/@SFARIorg BTI Fellow
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
🗣️Non-federal funding alert!!! Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) has a new RFA to join their IMPACT Network, a clinical-translational research effort to accelerate care for people across the spectrum by enabling rapid therapeutic development. Up to $15 million over 5 years.

bit.ly/3YRYMv3
Innovative Medicine and Precision Approaches to Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Network - GMMB-Aria: Production
bit.ly
May 21, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) aims to speed up the route from basic research to treatments for profound autism. Scientific director Matthew State shared more about the initiative’s goals and upcoming RFAs in a Q&A with @lauschenk.bsky.social.

www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/exp...
Expediting clinical trials for profound autism: Q&A with Matthew State
Aligning Research to Impact Autism, a new initiative funded by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, wants to bring basic science discoveries to the clinic faster.
www.thetransmitter.org
April 24, 2025 at 12:55 PM
We are looking to hire a Senior Data Manager for a new initiative focused on neurodevelopmental conditions for which @bostonchildrens.bsky.social will serve as the admin hub. Please feel free to share!

jobs.bostonchildrens.org/job/21859461...
Computational Health Informatics Data Manager II-Neuro
Careers at Boston Children’s Hospital will help you reach your goals – both in and out of the workplace.
jobs.bostonchildrens.org
April 30, 2025 at 6:00 PM
The Cohen Lab of Translational Neuroimaging is looking to hire a bioinformatics and research data scientist to help accelerate our research and develop new analysis tools! @bostonchildrens.bsky.social @braincircuits.bsky.social

Please consider applying or sharing!
jobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...
Biomedical Informatics Research Data Scientist I- - Boston Childrens Hospital - Job Details
Job Details: Our mission is to identify the brain circuits responsible for symptoms common in autism and other neurodevelop
jobs.brassring.com
March 4, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Amazing work by Julian Kutsche and the many other collaborators. @drdrxanderli.bsky.social
@andreashorn.org @harvardmed.bsky.social
February 13, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Reduced function or injury to the frontal pole may increase creativity by disengaging the self-monitoring & cognitive control actions of the frontal pole to allow novelty seeking & creativity to be unleashed. @braincircuits.bsky.social @foxmdphd.bsky.social @julianneumann.bsky.social
February 13, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
How can a brain disease increase creativity? We derive a brain circuit from creative tasks demonstrating they share reduced activity in the right frontal pole. Then we show that brain lesions & neurodegeneration that increase creativity are connected to this location
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Mapping Neuroimaging Findings of Creativity and Brain Disease
This study using network mapping of meta-analytic data investigates whether creativity maps to a specific brain circuit and whether damage to that circuit aligns with creativity changes observed in pe...
jamanetwork.com
February 13, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
🗣️ Language is widely distributed throughout the brain 🧠

In a recent correspondence in @natrevneurosci.bsky.social, we suggest that there is no 'language network' in the brain. What appears as such is an inevitable illusion created in part by the methods we use.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
January 31, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Excellent resource!!!
MIT's Career Advising and Professional Development Office has created a Career Handbook, a guide for developing the knowledge and skills you’ll need throughout your career.

Download the handbook in the link below.

capd.mit.edu/resources/ca...
Career Handbook
Here it is: your starter guide for developing the knowledge and skills you’ll need throughout your career. Compiled by our expert staff, here’s what this handbook covers:Overview of the…
capd.mit.edu
January 7, 2025 at 8:22 AM
I would have titled this: “Shining a light on the black hole: Look you can see activations in orbitofrontal cortex now!”
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ludwig Sichen Zhao, Jay A. Gottfried, et al:

Leveraging multi-echo EPI to enhance BOLD sensitivity in task-based olfactory fMRI

doi.org/10.1162/imag...
December 5, 2024 at 3:45 AM
Completely agree.
It’s really heart breaking to realize just how much our short horizon, outcome focused funding cycles hurt science. We could do so much more if we could invest in people long term. Staff scientist positions and an ecosystem to support them are direly needed.
December 4, 2024 at 12:12 AM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
This is wild! What a cool idea and set of approaches.

#neuroimaging #neuroskyence
#Neuroimaging crowd, hear me out! 👀
Did you ever want to add #EyeTracking to your #fMRI study but found it too much hassle? Got existing data you’d love to add eye tracking to?

Consider trying out *MR-based eye tracking* (i.e. inferring gaze from eye voxels)!

Here is a 🧵 with a few options!👇 1/9
December 2, 2024 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
I think there is a way to do exploratory research very rigorously. Just use full transparency. Publish the entire github history for the analysis chain, nits, zits, and all. And of course, focus more on the strength of evidence than posthoc narrative building.
I really enjoyed reading this world view in Nature about the importance of exploratory research in the social sciences by @balazsaczel.bsky.social and am wondering what people think. Do you generally agree with his point? 🧪@natureportfolio.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Let the data talk: embrace exploratory research
Open-ended research is essential to building solid hypotheses in the social sciences — without it, even the best-planned analyses can fail.
www.nature.com
November 29, 2024 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
The work incorporating optimisation to guide experiment design/analysis is also a way to do rigorous exploratory research. E.g.,

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
November 29, 2024 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Students don't need a perfect teacher. Students need a happy teacher, who's gonna make them excited to come to school and grow a love for learning.
November 29, 2024 at 7:14 PM
Great book!
November 30, 2024 at 12:39 AM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Recruiting diverse talent is insufficient; we need retention. And we can do better.

Here’s hoping this highly practical paper is helping guide change in academia.

newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/a...
newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org
November 29, 2024 at 9:56 PM
@nilearn.bsky.social + JupyterLab + [insert cluster/cloud of your choice] is my happy place…
Welcome @nilearn.bsky.social to Bluesky! Nilearn is an amazing package for neuroimaging analysis in Python - certainly one of the most heavily used packages in our lab.
November 27, 2024 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
The strain on scientific publishing: we set out to characterise the remarkable growth of the scientific literature in the last few years, in spite of declining growth in total scientists. What is going on?

direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A 🧵 1/n
#AcademicSky #PhDchat #ScientificPublishing #SciPub
November 19, 2024 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Special thanks:
@earlkmiller.bsky.social @jeromelecoq.bsky.social @apeyrache.bsky.social @gauteeinevoll.bsky.social
@jvoigts.bsky.social
@lmprida.bsky.social
Lisa Giacomo, Luca Mazzocato, Stephanie Palmer, Andre Fenton, Satrajit Ghosh, Christophe Bernard, Zhe Chen, Anna Devor, Soledad Gonzalo
November 25, 2024 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
🚨📣Job ad 📣🚨
Interested in a post-doc creating machine learning tools for neurodevelopmental disorders? Come work with us at the IMAGINE lab!
www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/100005-...
imaginelab.github.io
November 25, 2024 at 9:59 AM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
Combining some interests: here’s a NYC transit map of the brachial plexus that I made. #MedEd
November 25, 2024 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
My deep learning course at the University of Geneva is available on-line. 1000+ slides, ~20h of screen-casts. Full of examples in PyTorch.

fleuret.org/dlc/

And my "Little Book of Deep Learning" is available as a phone-formatted pdf (nearing 700k downloads!)

fleuret.org/lbdl/
November 26, 2024 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by Alexander Li Cohen
1 of 4 linked commentaries on dynamic connectivity in Imaging Neuroscience, by Diego Vidaurre:

Dynamic functional connectivity: Why the controversy?

doi.org/10.1162/imag...
November 25, 2024 at 6:25 AM