Tamara Vanderwal
Research Interests
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Research Options
Research Methodology
Recruitment
- Movie + OCD = This project creates and tests a novel movie stimulus designed specifically to evoke symptoms of OCD while participants are undergoing fMRI scans. The goal is to identify a disorder-specific network that has clinical relevance at the individual-subject level. Analytic approaches will include machine-based learning algorithmes (e.g., Connectome Predictive Modeling) and intersubject approaches. The longterm goal is to turn this project into a multi-site pediatric study.
- Precision mapping in female youth with depression = This project aims to track brain changes as individual female patiens with depression get better. We use movie-fMRI to collect long brain scans longitudinally in youth. We also aim to better understand the effects of normally occuring hormonal changes on functional brain organization in these indiviuals.
- Pediatric hyperalignment = Brain scans from different participants in a study are usually lined up with each other according to structural landmarks. This project tests a different approach that uses brain function to line up children's brains. We think this may provide a powerful methodological improvement that would improve signal-to-noise ratios in pediatric fMRI studies.
- Movie + Neurosurgery = This project is at the early beginning stage. We want to make a movie that evokes multiple language functions at the individual patient level. The goal is to enable precise mapping of crucial language networks in even very young pediatric patients who have to undergo neurosurgery.
Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
The field of precision psychiatry aims to use biologically based data from individual subjects to shift the focus from the group to the individual for diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of psychiatric disorders. The type of data used for precision psychiatry can vary, and the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data has shown promising results. However, this endeavor has been limited by the quality of fMRI data. Specifically, for fMRI data to be clinically useful, measures of functional connectivity (FC) must be reliable across repeated scans and sensitive to individual differences in connectivity. Further, we must be able to collect fMRI scans of sufficient length. Ongoing attempts to address these issues focus on methodological techniques, but acquisition state has been overlooked. fMRI scans for precision psychiatry are almost exclusively collected during resting-state, when participants lay in the scanner and stare at a fixation cross. The rapidly advancing field of movie-fMRI offers important advantages for data quality and quantity: it improves reliability, facilitates the detection of individual differences, and enables the collection of longer scans with better head motion and arousal. These advantages have been demonstrated at the whole-brain level, but it is not clear whether they apply to brain regions specifically important in psychiatry. Hence, we hypothesized that, relative to resting-state, movie-fMRI would improve data quality in three psychiatrically relevant brain regions: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and the right pre-supplementary motor area. To test this hypothesis, we compared three measures of test-retest reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Image Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Discriminability) and one proxy for the sensitivity to individual difference (a test-retest identification algorithm) between movie-watching and resting-state data from the open-source Human Connectome Project data. We also investigated the effect of increasing data amount on these measures. We found that movies were either equal, or superior, to rest across all measures in the three brain regions of interest, with the TPJ showing the most benefit from movies. Overall, our results suggest that movie-fMRI appears to be a good candidate acquisition state to optimize FC quality and quantity for precision psychiatry.
View record
Publications
- Getting the nod: Pediatric head motion in a transdiagnostic sample during movie- and resting-state fMRI (2022)
PLOS ONE, 17 (4), e0265112 - Getting the Nod: Characterizing pediatric head motion in movie- and resting-state fMRI (2021)
- Towards clinical applications of movie fMRI (2020)
NeuroImage, - ADHD desynchronizes brain activity during watching a distracted multi-talker conversation (2019)
NeuroImage, - Shared understanding of narratives is correlated with shared neural responses (2019)
NeuroImage, 184, 161--170 - Stability and similarity of the pediatric connectome as developmental measures (2019)
- The Functional Brain Organization of an Individual Allows Prediction of Measures of Social Abilities Transdiagnostically in Autism and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (2019)
Biological Psychiatry, 86 (4), 315--326 - Movies in the magnet: Naturalistic paradigms in developmental functional neuroimaging (2018)
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, - The Variability of Neural Responses to Naturalistic Videos Change with Age and Sex (2018)
eneuro, 5 (1), ENEURO.0244--17.2017 - Individual differences in functional connectivity during naturalistic viewing conditions (2017)
NeuroImage, 157, 521--530 - Shared understanding is correlated with shared neural responses in the default mode network (2017)
bioRxiv, - The Healthy Brain Network Serial Scanning Initiative: a resource for evaluating inter-individual differences and their reliabilities across scan conditions and sessions (2017)
GigaScience, 6 (2), 1--14 - Age and sex modulate the variability of neural responses to naturalistic videos (2016)
- Polypharmacy in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: More Than the Sum of Its Parts? (2016)
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 55 (8), 641--642 - Inscapes: A movie paradigm to improve compliance in functional magnetic resonance imaging (2015)
NeuroImage, 122, 222--232 - Of Bandwagons and Bathwater: The Value of Resting State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Child Psychiatric Research (2013)
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 52 (6), 562--565 - Self, mother and abstract other: An fMRI study of reflective social processing (2008)
NeuroImage, 41 (4), 1437--1446
Membership Status
Member of G+PS
View explanation of statuses
Location
Program Affiliations
Academic Unit(s)
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.
