TEDxHendrixCollege - Andy James - The Cognitive Connectome May 17, 2011

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Dr. Andy James is exploring individual differences in cognition using fMRI. By developing a cognitive connectome, or a map of connections in the brain that are involved in cognition, Dr. James hopes to identify the cognitive differences between healthy individuals to help understand cognition in both healthy and clinical populations.

Dr. Andrew James is an assistant professor in the Brain Imaging Research Center of the Psychiatric Research Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. After receiving bachelor degrees in Chemistry and Applied Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999, he pursued graduate studies in neuroscience at the University of Florida. There he was introduced to functional magnetic resonance imaging, which combined his passions for analytic instrumentation and cognition. After receiving his Neuroscience Ph.D. in 2005, he spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology before accepting a professorship at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Dr. James's research focuses upon developing novel experimental designs and statistical analyses to push the methodological boundaries of functional neuroimaging. His past research has encompassed a broad range of topics including age-related changes in neural networks mediating motor learning, the neural encoding of aftertaste perception, the reorganization of motor networks following stroke, and modeling inter- and intra-subject variability in emotion-regulating networks with major depressive disorder. His recent work focuses on how the brain encodes individual differences in reasoning and personality, where he seeks to bridge the gap between well-validated neuropsychological measures of cognition and the brain's functional networks.

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