Vince D. Calhoun, Ph.D.

Neuroimaging experts at Georgia State University are using artificial intelligence to map the distinct brain patterns of various mental illnesses.

The project is being led by Vince Calhoun, PhD, director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science, and Sergey Plis, director of machine learning at the TReNDS center. Using various datasets, they plan to develop multi-modal biomarkers to help diagnose mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and depression… Continue reading.

Vince Calhoun, one of the world’s foremost experts in brain imaging and analysis, has been named the founding director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) at Georgia State University.

TReNDS will be a tri-institutional effort supported by Georgia State, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, with a focus on increasing cooperation among Atlanta brain imaging researchers.

Calhoun will be professor of psychology at Georgia State, with secondary appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Physics and in the Neuroscience Institute. In addition, he will have appointments at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He will have additional appointments at Emory in the departments of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Radiology and Imaging Sciences. Calhoun is joining the university as a Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar in Brain Health and Image Analysis, becoming the first eminent scholar with appointments at three institutions… Continue reading.

What happens in your brain when you hear voices that aren’t there?  What happens when you see things that no one else sees around you?  People with some mental illnesses struggle every day to separate reality from hallucinations and it appears those hallucinations trigger activity in specific parts of the brain.

Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico Vince Calhoun leads a research group that is asking those questions.  Calhoun is searching for a way to identify and characterize mental illness, specifically schizophrenia using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and Magneto encephalography (MEG) scanners that can detect activity in various regions of the brain.

The Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) at the Mind Research Network, in partnership with the University of New Mexico, received a $15 million grant that will position New Mexico as one of the premier brain imaging sites while expanding research on psychosis and mood disorders. This is a second phase of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Institutional Development Award (IDeA) funding for the Multimodal Imaging of Neuropsychiatric Disorders (MIND) COBRE study.

Vince Calhoun, Executive Science Officer of The MRN and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UNM, received the grant to continue studying schizophrenia and expand the research to include a wider range of disease categories to better understand the neural and genetic mechanisms of psychosis and mood disorders.

UNM School of Engineering Professor Vince D. Calhoun was elected to Fellow by AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) and IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for 2013. The grade of Fellow is the highest grade of membership in both organizations and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

Calhoun is the Executive Science Officer of The Mind Research Network (http://www.mrn.org) and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (primary) with additional appointments in Psychiatry, Computer Science, and Neurosciences.

He has spent much of his career focused on the development of flexible multivariate methods for integrating the huge amount of brain imaging and genetics data which is available today. Calhoun has developed advanced algorithms for identifying how brain regions ‘talk’ to one another (called functional connectivity) either during a specific task or at rest. He has also studied how these connections are impaired during mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment, among others).