Linden Parkes

The Systems Neuroscience and Psychopathology (SNaP) Lab is based at the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research located within the Rutgers Brain Health Institute. SNaP Lab focuses on two research areas: (i) developing mechanistic computational models to study the biological basis of large-scale neural systems and (ii) using these models to understand the developmental emergence of cognition & psychopathology.

We seek a deep understanding of the pathways linking brain networks to behavior and psychopathology. Achieving this understanding requires multidisciplinary research aiming to understand how cognition, behavior, and psychopathology emerge from the dynamic interactions between brain regions and how those interactions change across development. At SNaP Lab, we address specific questions relevant to this intersection of psychiatry and brain sciences: How do we improve machine learning models that link structure, function, and disease? How do we tease apart the brain markers that are specific to certain axes of psychiatric disorder from those that are general across disorders? How do we integrate our understanding of psychopathology with underlying neurodevelopmental processes to understand the root causes of mental illness? We probe these and related questions through the analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal neuroimaging data that we model with network analysis and machine learning.

In 2023, the SNaP lab—together with the labs of Dr. Waheed Bajwa, Dr. David Zald, and Dr. Avram Holmes—were awarded pilot funding from the OVPR to develop new machine learning methods for neuroscience.