Grace McIlvain
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Some children fall behind in development, and spotting this early can lead to earlier help. That requires reliable ways to see how the brain's physical makeup relates to how it works.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
magnetic resonance elastography
brain stiffness
brain mechanical properties
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Establish benchmark structure-function relationships in healthy young adults by relating regional brain stiffness and damping ratio, measured with magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), to performance on cognitive and emotional tasks.
- Measure how regional brain mechanical properties relate to cognitive, emotional and language function in neurotypical children during a key developmental window, using fast, task-independent whole-brain MRE scans.
- Compare relationships between brain mechanics and function in adults and children to learn how ongoing brain maturation shapes them, and assess whether MRE is feasible as a reliable biomarker in young people.
More about the research
Today's main tools struggle with young children. Functional MRI (fMRI), which tracks brain activity, needs a child to do a task during a long scan. Standard structural MRI often misses the fine, cell-level changes that matter most in early brain development.
Why it matters
Children with developmental delays could benefit if a fast, task-free brain scan could flag functional deficits early. Families and clinicians could then begin intervention sooner and direct resources where they are most needed. This project would set adult and child benchmarks that future studies could use to test whether MRE predicts later outcomes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kshitiz Upadhyay
University of Minnesota, MN·Biomedical Engineering
Build linear viscoelastic models of brain tissue from several brain regions using wide-band magnetic resonance elastography, an MRI method that measures tissue stiffness with vibrations.
Ashley Nielsen
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience·Early-career
Code parent-child interaction videos at age 1 to measure unpredictability in parents' sensory signals (visual, auditory, touch) and in their emotional signals (inconsistent nurturing or support).
David Warren
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Neuroscience
Provide MRI data collection for human cognitive neuroscience studies of children and adults, using a research-dedicated 3T Siemens Prisma scanner that can image brain structure, activity, white-matter connections and chemistry (spectroscopy).
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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