Jordan TheriaultI am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Department of Biology at Northeastern University, with a Research Affiliate appointment to the Department of Radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. At Northeastern, I co-direct the Interdisciplinary Affective Sciences Laboratory with Drs. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Karen Quigley.
My research focuses on the brain-based metabolic costs of information encoding and their implications for mental health. This focus fits into a broader framework, which considers the brain as an organ for predicting and controlling internal and external (i.e., interoceptive and exteroceptive) sensory input received by the brain. I take the perspective that the brain has an overall evolutionary purpose: it coordinates activity in the body (e.g. among other organs), and helps its owner navigate an environment to receive a metabolic return on its metabolic investments. Action, perception, and cognition all have metabolic costs, and a well-adapted organism invests in these processes to get the metabolic resources it needs. This is fundamentally a systems-based approach to brain function. My current area of specific research interest focuses on a metabolic processes—called aerobic glycolysis, or sometimes nonoxidative glycolysis—that coincides with typical “neural activity”, measured by BOLD fMRI. This metabolic process consumes more glucose, generates less energy (ATP), and would acidify the local neural environment if its waste products were not cleared by a subsequent increase in blood flow. By focusing on the neurochemical and neurobiological details of this very specific metabolic pathway, we can pull some very old scientific metaphors into question, like the idea that brain regions are “activated” by stimuli. In sum, I focus on the biological details of the brain so that their implications and constraints for more abstract scientific questions (e.g., related to psychology, cognition, mental health) can be teased out. Methodologically, I have used a combination of tools, with a particular focus on neuroimaging techniques (conducted at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging). One technique is high-resolution 7T fMRI, which we use to image subcortical nuclei. Another technique, which is critical for questions of brain metabolism, is to combine innovative quantitative imaging techniques in the context of combined PET-MR imaging. At the Martinos Center, with my collaborator Dr. Christin Sander, I have combined functional FDG-PET imaging with calibrated fMRI, which allows us to collect absolute measures of BOLD signal intensity, cerebral blood flow, glucose metabolism, and oxygen metabolism, during both task and rest. This technique allows us to have a localized and quantified understanding of brain metabolism under varying levels of task demand. My analysis pipelines use a combination of languages with a particular focus on Python-based neuroimaging (e.g., using Nilearn), and these pipelines incorporate Docker to create reproducible computing environments. I can be reached at [email protected] |
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