Erica Zeng MSc Candidate

I am a Master's of Science student in Bioinformatics at the BC Children's Hospital Research Institute, working under the guidance of Dr. Todd Woodward and Dr. Mahesh Menon. I earned my bachelor's degree in Medical Science from the University of Western Ontario. My research interests are in cognitive neuroscience, particularly in understanding functional brain networks. My current research focuses on identifying and characterizing these networks using constrained principal component analysis (CPCA) to analyze task-based fMRI data. By establishing a baseline of healthy brain activity, our goal is to compare and analyze these networks in psychiatric patients to identify deviations from normal activation patterns. This insight could facilitate the identification of potential treatment targets through methods such as neuromodulation.