Population Neuroimaging

Ryan Muetzel, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology at the Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam. Ryan completed his undergraduate training in psychology and biology at the University of Minnesota, and his Master of Science degree in Epidemiology at the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences. His PhD focused on population neuroscience and neuroimaging at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He Co-Directs one of the world's largest neuroimaging studies of neurodevelopment, the Generation R Study. His group, the Integrative and Precision Neuroimaging Lab focuses on studying typical and atypical brain development using longitudinal neuroimaging data across four domains: i.) understanding the bidirectional relationship between psychiatric problems and brain over time, ii.) using statistical learning techniques to identify complex patterns in neuroimaging data which are predictive of mental illness, iii.) understanding how various risk and resilience factors shape the brain in the context of mental illness, and iv.) development of open source population neuroimaging tools which enable neuroimaging researchers to incorporate epidemiological concepts into their work. Tonya White, MD, PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam. She received Bachelors (Magna Cum Laude from the University of Utah) and Masters (University of Illinois) degrees in Electrical Engineering prior to completing medical school at the University of Illinois and later a Ph.D. from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her residency involved a combined pediatrics, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry program (Triple Board Program) at the University of Utah, after which she completed a research fellowship in neuroimaging under the mentorship of Nancy C. Andreasen. Following a junior faculty position at the University of Minnesota, she joined the faculty at Erasmus University Medical Center in 2009 to set up and direct the neuroimaging program in the Generation R study, which has become the largest neuroimaging birth cohort in the world. Her primary focus is in pediatric population neuroimaging. Her primary research goals are to apply neuroimaging techniques to obtaining a better understanding of genetic and environmental factors associated with typical and atypical brain development in hopes that this will translate into either preventing or decreasing the morbidity of severe psychiatric disorders. Henning Tiemeier is a Professor of Social and Behavioral Science and the Sumner and Esther Feldberg Chair in Maternal and Child Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, where he directs the Harvard Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health. He received both his medical and sociological degrees from the University of Bonn, Germany, and his PhD from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Tiemeier is a psychiatric epidemiologist who studies child development in population-based cohort studies. His work has a focus on prenatal exposures such as maternal depression and substance use. Much of his work takes a neurodevelopmental approach and his group conducted large scale brain imaging studies in children and adolescents. Recent work shows how parenting and environmental risk factors relate to brain development in childhood and pre-adolescence. Other studies highlight methodological problems in child and adolescent psychiatric research using multi-informant assessments. His multidisciplinary work combining epidemiology, genetics, brain imaging, and child development bridges historically separate disciplines and forms Population Neuroscience. He has conducted large scale population-based birth cohorts from fetal life onwards as well as follow-up studies of international adoptees with exposure to early life trauma and abuse.

At the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, he mainly focusses on Population Neuroscience, he has received NIH funding to establish the Mississippi Delta Center of Excellence in Maternal Health to conduct observational studies and trials to improve maternal morbidity, and also works on a longitudinal study of children of incarcerated mothers. Tiemeier has received several honors among which the 2017 Dutch VICI prize, the 2019 Leon Eisenberg Award, and the 2023 Alzheimer Award.