Interview with Martijn van den Heuvel
Researcher Martijn van den Heuvel was among the first awardees of a Rudolf Magnus Young-Talent Fellowship. He is pursuing his idea that some junctions in our brain not only work better than others, but that they also form a tight network: a ‘rich-club’. “This rich-club idea fascinates me,” he says, “and especially the question how it functions in brain disorders.”
Van den Heuvel studied Cognitive Artificial Intelligence. He links his interest in network theory with neuroimaging and aims to add ways to predict how brain diseases develop. “Doctors –radiologists, neurologists and psychiatrists– are now starting to see possibilities to use connectome tools to get a better understanding of brain disorders. I am now mapping network junctions in the brain, and try to find out why some work better than others.”
Martijn showed that some regions in the brain, so-called hubs, are extremely well connected. “The really exciting thing is that hubs are also strongly connected to each other and form a central rich-club core that plays an important role in global information integration. We are now aiming to zoom in to the neuronal level to see what it is that makes these regions so centrally connected. You can imagine that disruption of this system –on the cellular and the macroscale level- can lead to a serious disruption of brain function. The next question is now to figure out why this rich club is so special, which connectome and hub changes are disease specific, and how potential disruptions in rich club organization might relate to genetic vulnerability.”
