Team

RANDY MCINTOSH
Scientist

My early memories include coming up with a theory for how diseases spread and designing rockets so that my brother and I could replicate Evel Knievel stunts. Fortunately, that design never made it to production.

I got inspired to study the brain in my first year Psychology class, taught by Rob Sutherland at the University of Lethbridge, which was followed by a class on Brain and Behaviour from Ian Whishaw. I was hooked on neuroscience. Shortly thereafter I was fortunate to get a student position with Rod Cooper at the University of Calgary. There, I started learning about “neuroimaging” with the autoradiographic 2-deoxyglucose method, where we studied the relation of learning and visual system function in rats. It was shortly around this time where my interest in exploring brain networks, rather than regions, emerged. This led to a parallel development of analytic tools, which formed the basis of my PhD work done with Francisco Gonzalez-Lima at the University of Texas at Austin. The methods continued to evolve when I did my postdoctoral fellowship with Barry Horwitz and NIH, where we moved the network analysis tools to human neuroimaging (see our paper for a narrative of this journey).

The analytic methods were never developed in a theoretical vacuum. Early on in my neuroscience career, I drew inspiration from the seminal works of Cajal, Lashley, Hebb, and Luria, who all emphasized aspects distributed functions of the brain in creating the mind. Most of my work has taken these ideas and developed them through empirical investigation to form new perspectives on brain networks. I now benefit from frequent interactions with many colleagues in hammering out these ideas, including Giulio Tononi, Olaf Sporns, and my close collaborators Petra Ritter and Viktor Jirsa. Many of the discussions happened as part of the long running Brain Connectivity Workshops. Indeed, one of these meetings led to a pub chat with Viktor the spawned to development of TheVirtualBrain, the most recent example of novel tools to study brain network function.

While I am a scientist, that’s not all I do. My early curiosity of science happened at the same time as I developed interest in music. I am drawn to music from a deeply personal space and find it a wonderful complement to my scientific aspirations. Like other forms of art, music and science overlap so much that I often find insight from considering music as a way to understand how the brain works. If you go through my social media posts, you’ll find my posts are split between my scientific and my musical interests. There is other stuff I post, but we won’t talk about that here :) 

LAB MEMBERS

Click on each profile picture for more information.

VISITING Lab MEMBERS

Due to COVID-19 and the difficulties imparted by travel bans and healthy & safety concerns, we are not currently hosting any visiting trainees. We hope to welcome students back into the lab, once it is safe to do so.

Key COLLABORATORS

Viktor Jirsa, Aix-Marseille Université

Petra Ritter, Charité Universitat Medicine Berlin

Ana Solodkin, University of California, Irvine

Olaf Sporns, Indiana University

Gustavo Deco, University Pompeu Fabra

Michael Breakspear, Queensland Institute of Medical Research 

LAB ALUMNI

Marc Berman, Assistant Professor @ University of Chicago

Gleb Bezgin, Research Associate @ McGill University

Tanya Brown, Scientific Coordinator @ Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Roberto Cabeza, Professor @ Duke University

Jeremy Caplan, Principle Investigator of Computational Memory Lab @ University of Alberta

Sarah Carpentier, Associate @ BEworks

Valeria Della-Maggiore, Director @ Physiology of Action Lab in Buenos Aires

Andreaa Diaconescu, Post Doctoral Fellow @University of Zurich

Amanda Easson, Senior Business Insights Analyst @ Toronto Dominion

Zainab Fatima, Post Doctoral Fellow @ Northwestern University

Erin Gibson

John Griffiths, Assistant Professor (status only) @ CAMH; Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

Tyler Good, Behavioural Scientist Fellowship @ Public Health Agency of Canada ,Impact and Innovation Unit

Reza Habib, Associate Professor @ Southern Illinois University

Jennifer Heisz, Assistant Professor @ McMaster University

Roxanne Itier, Associate Professor @ University of Waterloo

Janine Jennings, Associate Professor of Psychology & Director of Undergraduate studies @ Wake Forest University

Stefan Koehler, Chair - Cognitive, Developmental and Brain Sciences @ Western University

Michele Korostil, Consultant Psychiatrist @ Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH); Lecturer @ University of Toronto

Martin LePage, Professor @ McGill University & Researcher/Clinical Psychologist @ Douglas Mental Health University Institute

Bratislav Misic, Principle Investigator @ Network Neuroscience Lab, Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI)

Sandra Moses

Lars Nyberg, Professor @ Umea University

Jordan Poppenk, Assistant Professor @ Queen's University

Andrea Protzner, Associate Professor @ University of Calgary

Maria Natasha Raja, Associate Professor @ McGill University

Anjali Raja-Beharelle, Post Doctoral Fellow @ University of Zurich

Valerie Salimpoor, Scientific Consultant

Vinoja Sebanayagam, Medical student @ Wayne State University School of Medicine

Vasily Vakorin, NeuroInformatics and NeuroAnalytics Lead @ Simon Fraser University

Antonio Vallesi, Associate Professor @ University of Padova

Grigori Yourganov, Postdoctoral Scholar @ University of South Carolina

Joelle Zimmermann, Psychological and Behavioral Scientist @ Magic Leap