Congratulations to Amy Kuceyeski, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics in Radiology, on receiving a $750,000 grant from the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative (WBHI), a joint University of California, Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), and Cornell University brain imaging consortium that advances women’s health. Dr. Kuceyeski, who heads the Computational Connectomics Laboratory at the Brain Health Imaging Institute, was awarded the WBHI grant for advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and computational neuroimaging methods in women’s brain health.
“This funding supports the development of computational tools at WCM and Cornell University to analyze women’s brain health data, including MRI-based neuroimages, so that we may better understand how events in a woman’s life, including menstrual cycles, oral contraceptives, pregnancy, menopause, and aging, can impact the brain,” says Dr. Kuceyeski. “This grant also supports the training of the next generation of scientists specializing in computational neuroimaging in women’s brain health. Finally, we are organizing public data challenges along with Women in Data Science and Kaggle so that everyone interested in data science and AI can develop their own tools to understand women’s brain health.”
Historically, neuroscientists have focused their research on men, neglecting the unique issues that affect women’s brain health. In founding WBHI, Ann S. Bowers, a Cornell University alumnus, the benefactor and namesake of the Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, aimed to change that. And Dr. Kuceyeski is part of that change.
“The fact that 0.1% of all neuroscience studies over the past decade have focused on women’s health issues means that there is an abundance of low-hanging fruit for impactful discoveries,” says Dr. Amy Kuceyeski. “AI has rapidly advanced in the past few years, and we aim to harness that power to unravel the mysteries of the female brain.”