Manish Saggar
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Psychiatric diagnoses are still largely based on lists of symptoms rather than on how the brain works. The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is a research framework that instead organizes mental function into domains, such as reward or cognition, grounded in brain circuits, genes, molecules and behavior.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Computer Science
- Topics
Research Domain Criteria
RDoC
psychiatric nosology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Test whether constructs within the same RDoC domain overlap more than constructs across domains, by computationally mining three large general-population and patient datasets.
- Determine whether constructs within an RDoC domain relate to similar dimensions of psychopathology, and how age, diagnosis and sex affect this structure.
- Test whether task-free resting-state brain scans can be mined to extract the domain-specific information usually obtained from task-based neuroimaging.
More about the research
Its long-term goal is a classification of mental disorders based on biology. Since RDoC began, however, no one has broadly tested from data whether its structure holds up. This project aims to provide that bottom-up test.
Why it matters
A data-driven check of RDoC could refine the framework and bring biology-based psychiatric diagnosis closer to clinical use. If resting-state scans carry the same information as task scans, studies of patients with mental illness could become easier and cheaper to run. The work could also generate new hypotheses about how mental function is organized by age, sex and diagnosis.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Damian Stanley
Adelphi University, NY·Psychology
Identify social computational phenotypes associated with mental health spectra in an exploratory online sample of 1,000 adults, combining computational models of social and nonsocial learning tasks with HiTOP symptom assessment.
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).
Itamar Kahn
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Chart how brain network organization, especially system segregation, changes across the mouse lifespan by repeatedly scanning the same awake mice with resting-state fMRI from 3 to 21 months of age.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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