Youjin Lee, Ph.D. Brown University Manning Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, received a Brown University Carney Institute for Brain Science award from their NIH funded Center for Central Nervous System Function (COBRE). This award is for faculty or senior post-doctoral fellows to collect preliminary data in support of grant applications for independent external research funding, especially from NIH, in the area of fundamental or translational neuroscience. Ani Eloyan, Ph.D. Brown University Assistant Professor of Biostatistics will serve as the project's mentor and collaborator.

The award is titled,  “Reliable and robust causal inference approaches for effective connectivity research with fMRI data". The goal of this award is to develop reliable and robust causal inference methods to infer effective connectivity between brain regions. This proposed research will raise awareness of potential sources of bias and misleading findings in neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI) data, as well as provide more reliable and robust inferential tools than existing methods that are often relying on a single p-value from a single parameter in the presumed parametric model. The team will also develop statistical software that will produce causal estimates and their uncertainty measures given the user-specific assumptions.