Jean-Baptiste Poline

Jean-Baptiste (JB) Poline is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill; the co-Chair of the NeuroHub and Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) at the Montreal Neurological Institute & Hospital (the NEURO); and a Primary Investigator at the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health. Among its early pioneers, Poline is a leading researcher in the fields of fMRI, imaging genetics research, and the neuroinformatics technologies that make a big-data approach to neuroscience possible. Through his research, he has developed several novel data-analysis techniques in statistical modeling and inference for functional brain imaging (fMRI, PET) with applications to large imaging genetic datasets. He also co-developed the most widely-used fMRI software to date: Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). Ongoing innovations in genome-wide association studies and next-generation sequencing have helped identify some of the genetic factors underlying both neurological and mental disorders. Poline's research in brain imaging methods, specifically fMRI, has advanced this research by providing unique ways to explore the biological consequences of molecular changes induced by genetic variants on brain development—the effects of genetic variations on brain structure, function, and connectivity.