Editor's note: See our Director's Seminar webpage for upcoming speakers and topics, as well as videos of events that have already occurred.
Hillary Schwarb, a research scientist at the Biomedical Imaging Center who also is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, will speak at noon Thursday, Dec. 3, as part of the Beckman Institute Director's Seminar series. Schwarb will discuss "Brain elasticity and cognitive outcomes: The impact of brain mechanics on memory." Registration is required to access the lectures through Zoom.
Hillary Schwarb
"Brain elasticity and cognitive outcomes: The impact of brain mechanics on memory"
The advent of new technologies creates new opportunities to ask questions and make discoveries. In recent years, work at the Beckman Institute has pioneered the development of magnetic resonance elastography, an emerging tool for measuring microstructural tissue health in the brain using a clinical MRI scanner. In this talk, Schwarb demonstrates how this new technology is being applied to the study of human cognition, particularly memory, and how the use of this technique, coupled with sensitive measures of behavior, has allowed scientists to investigate the relationship between brain health and memory performance in previously unexplored populations of both healthy adults and patients with memory deficits.
Speaker Biography
Hillary Schwarb is a cognitive neuroscientist and experimental psychologist who studies memory and the neuoranatomy of memory systems. She received her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012 and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Illinois. She is currently a research scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working in both the Biomedical Imaging Center at the Beckman Institute and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute. Her current research focuses on leveraging multiple neuroimaging techniques (both structural and functional) to explore brain-behavior relationships within the memory system and the greater memory network. Her recent work has been instrumental in translating MR elastography tools to the study of cognition demonstrating that there are detectable microstructural differences in brain anatomy, even among healthy young adults, that show meaningful relationships with cognitive abilities.