I have no clue what my project is except having fun
Hey everyone, my name is Nick and I'm a 4th-year PhD candidate in clinical/research neuropsychology at UDeM. I'm mostly working with Consortum for the early identification of Alzheimer's disease-Quebec (CIMA-Q) data and the principal objective of my thesis is to better understand functional alterations (fMRI & functional connectivity) occuring in individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease or AD (mild cognitive impairment or MCI and subjective cognitive decline or SCD). I obtained my undergraduate diploma in psychology in 2015 and henceforth I'm not used to coding. Prior to this summerschool, I had made 2-3 graphs with R but that was pretty much it. I'm presently writing my thesis and looking for a post-doc (I will actually miss a part of the 4th week for a post-doc interview, VERY excited about it!!). I'm also beginning my first clinical internship at the Institut universitaire de gératrie de Montréal in September 2019 (so, pretty soon) while my second clinical internship will take place at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in March 2020.
When an individual meets criteria for dementia, neuropathophysiological changes have already been damaging his/her brain for several years (or decades). This understanding urges the scientfic community to search for early biomarkers in order to identify individuals in the very early phase of the disease and to better understand the early mechanisms that eventually lead to cognitive symptoms. It is within this context that my interest grew for functional alterations occuring in the early phase of the disease. Indeed, prior studies have found paradoxical higher levels of fMRI activation in individuals with MCI (i.e. hyperactivation) and also found that hyperactivation could predict cognitive decline and conversion to dementia. At first, hyperactivation was considered as a compensatory response from the brain to maintaint cognition at an optimal level in the presence of neuropathology. But ever since I began my PhD, a non-negligible amount of studies using fMRI and functionnal connectivity methods have also highlighted that abnormal levels of activation and connectivity patterns observed in prodromal AD could contribute to the spread of pathological proteins associated with the disease. Hence I'm highly interested in the potential of hyperactivation as an early biomarker for AD and in patterns of functional connectivity in individuals in the prodromal phase of AD (in SCD and MCI individuals, more precisely), and how these functional patterns relate to cognition.
Since all my data is analyzed and that I'm currently writing my thesis, I have no project to work on. Therefore my goal is to be more familiar with coding softwares, Github, Jupyter notebook and all this stuff. I think it would be realist for me to try to replicate the results from my papers using R and to learn how to make beautiful graphs.
And get free food.