Karl J. Friston
Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, London, UK
Curator and author
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Featured Author: Karl Friston
Karl Friston is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and the Scientific Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, UK. He was a professor in the Institute of Neurology and holds an honorary consultant post at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square London, UK. In 2000, he was president of the International Organization for Human Brain Mapping.
Karl Friston was awarded the first Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, where he was elected (1999) in recognition of contributions to the bio-medical sciences. He served twice as president of the International Organization of Human Brain Mapping. In 2003 he received the Minerva Golden Brain award. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.
Karl Friston is an authority on brain imaging. He invented Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). SPM is used widely for analyzing functional imaging data as well as EEG and MEG data. In 1994, his group developed voxel-based morphometry. VBM detects differences in neuroanatomy. It is also used clinically and as a surrogate in genetic studies. These technical contributions were motivated by schizophrenia research and theoretical studies of value-learning. In 1995 this work was formulated as the disconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia. In 2003 he created dynamic causal modelling (DCM). DCM is used to infer the architecture of distributed systems like the brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions.
For more information, visit http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/Friston/.
Scholarpedia articles:
- Functional Imaging , Scholarpedia, 2(5):1478. (2007)
- Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) , Scholarpedia, 3(4):6232. (2008)
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