Colin Buchanan

Research Associate

  • Psychology
  • School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Room F1, Psychology Building

City
7 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9JZ

Background

Colin is based in the Lothian Birth Cohorts team within the Psychology Department. He works with Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 and UK Biobank neuroimaging data as part of a 5-year NIH grant to investigate the brain's structural connectivity in relation to cognitive function, health and genes.

 

Research summary

Colin's field of work is connectomics, the study of the connectome, which seeks to map the connections of the brain as a network. Using imaging data obtained from diffusion MRI and whole-brain tractography, connectome methods are used to map the collective wiring of many billions of axonal nerve fibres across the brain. The connectome approach provides tools to ask neuroscientific questions concerned with healthy and pathological brain organisation. This approach may also provide evidence on how cerebral white matter underlies cognitive function.