Christine Massey is the Director of Research and Education at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is also the Director of PENNlincs, which serves as a research and development arm of the Institute, linking recent theory and research in cognitive science to education efforts in public schools and cultural institutions.

Innovation in data science and translational neuroscience to understand brain development and mental illness. Our research uses advanced analytics to integrate complex brain images and rich behavioral data.   Ultimately, we seek to map normal brain development and understand how alterations in brain maturation increase risk of psychiatric illness.

The human brain undergoes dramatic remodeling as it matures. Our work seeks to define normal patterns of brain development using multi-modal neuroimaging, network science, and machine learning methods.

Advances in psychiatric care are limited by our lack of understanding of the biology of these disorders. Using tools from network science and machine learning, we seek to link dysfunction in brain circuits to symptoms of mental illness such as irritability, executive dysfunction, impulsivity, and anhedonia.

Non-invasive neuroimaging methods continue to advance at a rapid pace. We develop software and analysis methods to minimize artifact, integrate high-dimensional data, maximize reproducibility, and enhance scalability. See our software page for further details.¹⁾ 

Adam Pines - Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Leveraging multi-shell diffusion for studies of brain development in youth and young adulthood We find key advantages of multi-shell diffusion metrics, including increased neurodevelopmental coupling and decreased spurious relationships with imaging data quality.

Zaixu Cui - Control Energy of Executive Function in Youth We leveraged advances in network control theory to describe how the structural connectome facilitates transitions to executive activation states

Cedric Huchuan Xia - Human Brain Mapping

Multi‐scale network regression for brain‐phenotype associations. We designed, implemented, and deployed a multi-variate statistical tool to extract novel brain‐behavior relationships that are present on multiple scales.²⁾

PennLINC highlighted in Nature - One of the primary efforts of PennLINC is to use neuroimaging and neuroinformatics to parse heterogenity in psychiatric conditions.

This work was highlighted in a recent feature in Nature, which provides an accessible overview of recent work that uses brain data to re-conceptualize psychopathology. The article includes reference to work by MD/PhD student Cedric Xia, a beautiful brain rendering from senior scientist Matt Cieslak, and comments from Ted. See the full article here.³⁾

The study tackles a fundamental question that has bothered researchers for more than a century. What are the roots of mental illness?

In the hope of finding an answer, scientists have piled up an enormous amount of data over the past decade, through studies of genes, brain activity and neuroanatomy. They have found evidence that many of the same genes underlie seemingly distinct disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, and that changes in the brain’s decision-making systems could be involved in many conditions.

Researchers are also drastically rethinking theories of how our brains go wrong. The idea that mental illness can be classified into distinct, discrete categories such as ‘anxiety’ or ‘psychosis’ has been disproved to a large extent. Instead, disorders shade into each other, and there are no hard dividing lines — as Plana-Ripoll’s study so clearly demonstrated.

Now, researchers are trying to understand the biology that underlies this spectrum of psychopathology.

They have a few theories. Perhaps there are several dimensions of mental illness — so, depending on how a person scores on each dimension, they might be more prone to some disorders than to others. An alternative, more radical idea is that there is a single factor that makes people prone to mental illness in general: which disorder they develop is then determined by other factors. Both ideas are being taken seriously, although the concept of multiple dimensions is more widely accepted by researchers.

The details are still fuzzy, but most psychiatrists agree that one thing is clear: the old system of categorizing mental disorders into neat boxes does not work.

They are also hopeful that, in the long run, replacing this framework with one that is grounded in biology will lead to new drugs and treatments. Researchers aim to reveal, for instance, the key genes, brain regions and neurological processes involved in psychopathology, and target them with therapies. Although it might take a while to get there, says Steven Hyman of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “I am long-term optimistic if the field really does its work.” A smorgasbord of disorders

The most immediate challenge is working out how to diagnose people. Since the 1950s, psychiatrists have used an exhaustive volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition. It lists all the recognized disorders, from autism and obsessive–compulsive disorder to depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Each is defined by symptoms. The inherent assumption is that each disorder is distinct, and arises for different reasons.

However, even before the DSM-5 was published in 2013, many researchers argued that this approach was flawed. “Any clinician could have told you that patients had not read the DSM and didn’t conform to the DSM,” says Hyman, who helped to draft the manual’s fifth edition.

Few patients fit into each neat set of criteria. Instead, people often have a mix of symptoms from different disorders. Even if someone has a fairly clear diagnosis of depression, they often have symptoms of another disorder such as anxiety. “If you have one disorder, you’re much more likely to have another,” says Ted Satterthwaite, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Mental health: On the spectrum

This implies that the way clinicians have partitioned mental disorders is wrong. Psychiatrists have tried to solve this by splitting disorders into ever-finer subtypes. “If you look at the way the DSM has evolved over time, the book gets thicker and thicker,” says Satterthwaite. But the problem persists — the subtypes are still a poor reflection of the clusters of symptoms that many patients have.

As a result, the world’s largest funder of mental-health science, the US National Institute of Mental Health, changed the way it funded research. Beginning in 2011, it began demanding more studies of the biological basis of disorders, instead of their symptoms, under a programme called the Research Domain Criteria.

There has since been an explosion of research into the biological basis of psychopathology, with studies focusing on genetics and neuroanatomy, among other fields. But if researchers hoped to demystify psychopathology, they still have a long way to go: the key finding has been just how complex psychopathology really is. ⁴⁾

PennLincs grows greatly, spreads to other schools By Penn, Staff, Daily Pennsylvanian, and PHILLIP SCHWENK 04/21/92 5:00am

As far as community service programs focusing on the learning that occurs in inner-city Philadelphia, PennLincs seems to be the new fad. The University-run program, which includes 230 University students, has jumped from six grade school participants in 1989 to 1000 children just three years later.

The program concentrates on presenting scientific information to grade school students, with no tests afterwards. Pennlincs allows the students to actively participate in the experiments which are taking place and come to their own conclusions about what they have observed. “[There's] much more in showing than in telling,” said Jean Roberts, a co-founder of the program. “It's not a one-way show, it's a two-way show.”

The program has caught the eyes of many private businesses and organizations, which are currently contributing just under $1,000,000 towards the ever-growing program. The program, which began with a series of sessions among several small groups of University students, has also interested several other colleges, including Rutgers and Drexel universities and Stevens College.

Temple University already has a similar program in place. According to Roberts, the program is successful because the University students use science as the primary topic of presentation and allow children to interact in the learning process. Roberts said the children themselves have become the driving force of PennLincs because they have shown great interest in the program.

“They have a lot of power, these children,” Roberts said. Roberts said the children are finding the program a positive experience, relating what one child said to her during a learning session. “They don't know it, they don't think they are,” the child said. “They're teaching us in there.” According to Roberts, the fact that the participating University students are learning as well as the children also contributes to the program's success.

Many students are using the program for research towards their own personal degrees. “Penn students are showing interest in community service,” Roberts said. “They want to benefit from the faculty and faculty knowledge . . . and bring it to the community.” As PennLincs continues to grow, the program's coordinators have set some goals, including establishing an undergraduate site for research education at the University.

Roberts believes the program is a positive step, and while making sure the University is given the credit for establishing PennLincs, is enthusiastic about the replication that is taking place on other college campuses. “The richness of the program is something we want to shout out from the ramparts of Penn,” said Roberts.⁵⁾