Guest Presenter: Dr. Gagan Wig (Associate Professor in the Department Psychology at The University of Texas at Dallas)

Talk Title: Brain network aging across health, space, and species

Abstract: Is aging-related cognitive decline a consequence of brain network failure? I will highlight efforts from my lab that have helped to develop and incorporate tools from network science to further our understanding of how the brain’s large-scale functional network organization changes across the lifespan. This work is revealing that functional brain network organization relates to an individual’s cognitive ability during healthy adulthood, and that brain network changes are uniquely prognostic of cognitive impairment (independent of structural atrophy and neuropathology). Our more recent observations have demonstrated that an individual’s environmental exposures exert an impact on their trajectory of brain network decline, which indicates that brain network organization can be used to measure disparities in brain health. Finally, I will touch on our initial steps towards developing non-human animal models of aging-related brain network changes, which we are pursuing in order to bridge the human aging work with efforts in other species. Collectively, these observations are offering a new perspective towards understanding healthy and pathological aging, spotlight a path for discovering vulnerabilities of brain aging that are linked to an individual’s past and present environmental exposures, and are catalyzing the development of a novel class of precision health measures which are based on patterns of large-scale brain network organization.