Harnessing Uniqueness: MNLEND Fellow Leverages Neuroscience Advances to Explore Brain-Behavior Links

A MN LEND fellow searches neuroimaging databases for patterns that could lead to more personalized and effective strategies for regulating emotions, or developing social cognition, among other skills.

Differences in individual brain structure and function – even within groups of people already diagnosed with autism, for example – create challenges for scientists trying to study how it contributes to functions such as language and social behavior.

Thanks to large neuroimaging databases now available at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, however, scientists are beginning to discover patterns that could point to more personalized and effective strategies for regulating emotions, or developing social cognition, among other skills.

Damien Fair, co-director of the MIDB and director of the Developmental Cognition and Neuroimaging Lab , and Sanju Koirala, a MNLEND fellow at the Institute on Community Integration, recently shared their work in neuroimaging studies with the 2022-23 MNLEND fellowship class. MNLEND stands for the Minnesota Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities, an interdisciplinary leadership training program spanning more than 16 disciplines across the University. Fair is an advisor to Koirala in the DCAN lab.

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