Naznin Virji-Babul

BHSc (PT), MA, PhD (Neuroscience)

Affiliate Investigator, BC Children's Hospital
Director, Interdisciplinary Research, Office of the Vice-President, Health, UBC Health

Dr. Virji-Babul's research program in cognitive neuroscience has two streams: (a) basic science studies focused on understanding brain structure and function underlying action perception/action execution networks, motor learning and the development of novel methods to analyze resting state effective connectivity and, (b) applied research studies of brain injury focused on identifying early indicators of concussion/mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in adolescents and on developing effective methods to improve recovery from TBI in adults.

Building on her ongoing efforts to understand brain organization, she and her team have been investigating the use of a novel connectivity measure based on information flow rates to map causal, directionally dependent interactions between different brain regions, i.e. effective connectivity. This is a powerful, more principled approach compared with other effective connectivity measures for mapping the direction of information flow in the brain.

Her work with collaborators who have expertise in big data, machine learning and statistical analysis has led to new line of study that applies and tests a deep learning neural network to automatically classify concussed athletes from healthy athletes using raw, resting state EEG data.