Dr. David Keator, M.S., Ph.D. (dbkeator at uci dot edu) has an extensive background in data science, applied machine learning, statistics, and informatics methods for structured data exchange and reproducibility in neuroimaging.  Since 1996 Dr. Keator has been the technical director (now operations director) of the UCI Neuroscience Imaging Center (formerly UCI Brain Imaging Center) responsible for image quality control, reconstruction, and statistical analysis. Dr. Keator has been the chair of the NeuroInformatics Working group FBIRN (Functional Biomedical Informatics Research Network), leading technical personnel from member sites in developing a federated database for storing and managing subject demographics, clinical assessments, imaging, and genetics information along with the supporting metadata representations.  Dr. Keator has co-developed the Neuroimaging Data Model (NIDM) a semantic web enabled metadata format for neuroimaging currently being incorporated into popular software packages such as SPM, FSL, and AFNI.  Dr. Keator is an active part of the International NeuroInformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) Neuroimaging Task Force and chairs the NIDM working group.  Dr. Keator directs the UCI Conte Center Informatics core, which is developing a center-wide informatics platform, based on semantic web technologies and using the NIDM standard to wrap source data across center projects and cores.  Visit me on GitHub and Twitter!  Full CV.

Nazek Queder, B.A. is a Junior Research Specialist in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior specializing in neuroimaging.   Her current research includes development of controlled vocabularies to improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging-related findings and to facilitate queries across publically-available data, supported by funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health BRAIN informatics program (1RF1MH120021-01). Nazek obtained my B.A. in psychology, with emphasis on cognitive neuroscience, from UC Irvine in 2019. She was lucky enough to have gained vivid research experience in cognitive neuroscience early in her career. Her passion for neuroscience can be traced back to her first year of college as she got involved in the undergraduate research program in psychology as a student researcher and a National Honor Society in Psychology leader. Her devotion only grew to allow her to become an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Lee’s Memory and Decision Making lab modeling human decision making, Yassa Translational Neurobiology Lab studying various learning and memory mechanisms, and Keator Lab working on developing a Down Syndrome brain atlas for PET amyloid accumulation in Alzheimer’s Disease research. Her research experience underlies clinical and behavioral memory and neurodegenerative disease research, human neuroimaging, machine learning, and mathematical modeling in cognitive science. She is especially interested in the changes in neural and structural brain anatomy demonstrated in neuroimaging as a result of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Lisa M. Taylor, B.A., M.A. is a Junior Research Specialist in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior specializing in neuroimaging.  Her current research involves dementia prediction using brain-derived phenotypes in neurotypical populations and patients with Down Syndrome funded by the National Institute of Aging (5U01AG051412-03) and age-related cognitive decline in neurotypical populations funded by the National Institute of Aging (R01AG053555-01A1).   Lisa is currently a Master’s degree candidate in Psychology at California State University Fullerton with a primarily focus on cognitive neuroscience. Her research interests include learning and memory, sleep, and neurobiology.  Her future research interests are to investigate how poor sleep hygiene and poor physical activity are contributing risk factors in developing dementia, as well as using neuroimaging to track potential neuroanatomical changes in the hippocampus and other affected regions.