Avram Holmes

Research in my laboratory is focused on discovering the fundamental organization of large-scale human brain networks, with a particular focus on higher-level cognition and the intersection of emotion and cognition. A core motivation that drives this work is the search for specific network-level signatures, or “fingerprints”, that co-vary with heritable behavioral variation in the general population and mark vulnerability for psychiatric illness onset. Using multiple neuroimaging and computational approaches, our current projects encompass three complementary domains of inquiry which aim to (1) characterize the organization of functional and anatomical brain networks; (2) establish reliable links between genetic variation, system-level brain function, and behavior in the general population; and (3) explore associations between disturbances in network organization and clinical presentation in psychiatric illness. Recently, our work has expanded to integrate whole-brain transcriptional data from human and non-human primates with estimates of in vivo brain function. It is our hope that this multi-scale approach will allow us to link phenomena across levels, from genes and molecules through cells, circuits, networks, and behavior, providing the opportunity to improve our understanding of the relations between brain systems, illness risk, and clinical course.