Psychiatry

The 2026 symposium presents research by the foundation’s achievement-prize recipients. Steven A. Kushner discusses precision psychiatry and its remaining challenges; Andrew H. Miller examines an inflammatory subtype of depression; Cynthia Rogers explores how early experience affects brain development and children’s mental health; Sheena Josselyn addresses memory and engrams; and Christine Yu Moutier considers translating suicide-prevention science into action. Jeffrey Borenstein gives the welcome and Carol A. Tamminga moderates. The programme runs on 30 October from 09:30 to 12:30 EDT. Participants may attend at Kaufman Music Center, 129 West 67th Street, New York City, or virtually. Registration through the linked event portal requires an account and selection of attendance mode.

In March we will focus on TMS and host Ghazaleh Soleimani and Colleen Hanlon. The talks will talk place on Thursday, March 28th at noon ET – please be aware that this means 5PM CET since Boston already switched to summer time! Ghazaleh Soleimani, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr Hamed Ekhtiari’s lab at the University of Minnesota. She is also the executive director of the International Network of tES/TMS for Addiction Medicine (INTAM). She will discuss “Adapting to diversity: Integrating variability in brain structure and function into personalized / closed-loop non-invasive brain stimulation for substance use disorders”. Colleen Hanlon, PhD, currently serves as a Vice President of Medical Affairs for BrainsWay, a company specializing in medical devices for mental health, including TMS. Colleen previously worked at the Medical University of South Carolina and Wake Forest School of Medicine. She received the International Brain Stimulation Early Career Award in 2023. She will discuss “Currents of Hope: how noninvasive brain stimulation is reshaping modern psychiatric care”. As always, we will also get a glimpse at the “Person behind the science”. Please register va talks.stimulatingbrains.org to receive the (free) Zoom link, subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Twitter/X for further updates!

Schizophrenia is considered to be a complex illness with multiple pathways contributing to its clinical phenotype and is argued to be a disorder of disrupted brain network organization. Structural covariance in schizophrenia indicates a system-level brain maturation disruption overlapping with patterns of disturbed functional connectivity. Structural covariance networks are typically computed at the group-level, which prevents individualized inferences. To advance precision medicine of schizophrenia, a reliable mapping of brain system-level heterogeneity at the subject-level is critical. Here, we computed individual ‘Deviation from a Normative Sample’ structural covariance networks (SCN) as networks based on regional gray matter volume (GMV). The nodes in an individual’s SCN represent brain regions of a given parcellation and edge weights quantify the individual’s deviation of pair-wise regional structural covariance from the normative structural covariance of a group of healthy controls. We then assessed their diagnostic value compared to voxel-based and regional GMV for the classification of patients with chronic schizophrenia (N = 71) and healthy controls (N = 74) in a series of support vector machines (SVMs). To assess the richness of information contained in graph-structured data, we trained models on different feature-sets spanning from local edge-weights to global network metrics. All the models performed significantly better than chance with the model trained on the SCNs edge-weights performing the best, reaching a balanced accuracy of 72.3% (sensitivity: 66.2%, specificity: 78.4%). These results highlight the potential of individual SCNs derived from cost-efficient and widely available T1 images. As a primer, we further discuss the utility of more sophisticated graph-learning methods for brain connectivity, such as graph-kernels and graph neural networks.

Scientific American's Science Quickly examines an early pilot trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for people with long-term anorexia. The episode carefully discusses reported changes in symptoms and motivation, possible neuroplasticity mechanisms, the small uncontrolled sample and the need for larger randomized studies and clinical safeguards.

In epilepsy research, a holy grail has been the identification and understanding of the "epileptogenic zone" - operationally defined as the (minimal) area or region of the brain is indispensible for the generation of epileptic seizures. The identification of the epileptogenic zone is particularly important for surgical treatments of focal epilepsy patients, but I will highlight some recent clinical, experimental and theoretical work showing that it is also fundamentally linked with our understanding of epilepsy and seizures. I will conclude with a proposal for an updated understanding of the epileptogenic zone and ictogenesis.

Jason Lerch presents a translational neuroimaging analysis spanning mouse models and human MRI cohorts to identify biologically informed subgroups across autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.

John N. Constantino and Jeffrey Borenstein examine how individualized education planning can support children with developmental, behavioral and mental-health challenges. Educators and counselors often recognize difficulties early, and the extensive time children spend at school offers a major opportunity to support maturation alongside clinical care. The discussion explores the complexities of individualized education plans and how educators and clinicians can apply precision-medicine approaches to tailor them to each child, making everyday school experiences more effective for development and adaptation.