Pravesh Parekh

Motion Insensitive Resting-State Analysis (MIRA): a new way to perform motion correction that effectively removes the confounding effect of motion on the rsfMRI derived correlation matrices! Meet me at poster F13 and at the flash talk session today at #Flux2025 to find out more about this!

Transparency in epidemiological analyses of cohort data a case study of the Norwegian mother, father, and child cohort study (MoBa) - BMC Medical Research Methodology Background Epidemiological research is central to our understanding of health and disease. Secondary analysis of cohort data is an important tool in epidemiological research but is vulnerable to pract...

New paper out 🚨 in BMC Medical Research Methodology

We assessed the prevalence of transparency-related practices in epidemiological secondary analyses for the Norwegian mother, father, and child cohort (MoBa).

shorturl.at/604hn

The ABCD Study 6.0 release is finally here! 🧠 Apply for data access here @theabcdstudy.bsky.social www.nbdc-datahub.org

Motion Insensitive Resting-State Analysis (MIRA): meet me at poster 1595 at #OHBM2025 to discuss a new way of performing motion correction for resting state fMRI that effectively removes the confounding effect of motion on rsfMRI derived correlation matrices!

Brisbane cityscape with the Brisbane sign in the foreground

Stoked to be attending #OHBM2025 this week with our UCSD / JCVI team! If you’re here, be sure to stop by my poster to see some cool work from our lab using GAMMs:
📅 W/Th June 25th/26th
🧠 "Nonlinear age trajectories of subcortical microstructural and morphometric changes in the ABCD study"

Meet me at #OHBM2025 poster 689 today/tomorrow to discuss using Fast and Efficient Mixed-Effects Algorithm (FEMA) for mixed-effects modeling with unstructured covariance and splines, perform longitudinal GWAS, and discover time-dependent genetic effects!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Led by the incredible @gauravbhalerao.bsky.social

Coming June 2025! We are excited to launch the NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Data Hub. This new data ecosystem will host & facilitate access to data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study & the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study.

1/13

GitHub - cmig-research-group/cmig_tools: Repository of cmig_tools including FEMA Repository of cmig_tools including FEMA. Contribute to cmig-research-group/cmig_tools development by creating an account on GitHub.

FEMA-Long is available for use here: github.com/cmig-researc...

All of these features are implemented in a computationally fast manner, thereby allowing scalability to very large datasets as well as large number of outcome variables like voxel-wise or vertex-wise analyses.

FEMA-Long can perform longitudinal GWAS with SNP*time non-linear interaction to discover SNPs showing time-varying effects. The top part of the Miami plots show SNPs having time-dependent effect compared to longitudinal GWAS (bottom part). Last panel shows the effect of a few selected SNPs over time

FEMA-Long can model unstructured covariance such as time-varying heritability and genetic correlations which are super critical for longitudinal datasets. Here, using the MoBa dataset, we show time-varying random effects for length, weight, and BMI in the first year of life.

Massive thank you to my amazing co-authors including @nadineparker.bsky.social @neuromusicnerd.bsky.social @jaholkowskipiotr.bsky.social @cmakowski.bsky.social @nichols.bsky.social and others who are not on BlueSky. Wouldn't have been possible without their help, support, kindness, and patience :)

FEMA-Long: Modeling unstructured covariances for discovery of time-dependent effects in large-scale longitudinal datasets Linear mixed-effects (LME) models are commonly used for analyzing longitudinal data. However, most applications of LME models rely on random intercepts or simple, e.g., stationary, covariance. Here, w...

Introducing FEMA-Long for high-dimensional large-scale mixed-effects modelling! Includes modelling unstructured covariance, non-linear effects using splines, time-dependent effects with spline interactions, and longitudinal GWAS with time-dependent genetic effects!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Data Sharing - ABCD Study

FYI, if you want to be prepared to apply for the next ABCD Study data release, prepare for these new NIST security requirements 🧠: @ohbmofficial.bsky.social abcdstudy.org/scientists/d...

celebrate package:celebrate R Documentation Audio 'announcements' when printing model summaries Description: The only function of this package is to augment the printing of model summaries with appropriate sound effects based on whether you have achieved the magical p<0.05 level of significance for at least one variable (not including the intercept - we have to try to be a _little_ bit sensible ...) Details: Sounds are taken from <http://freesounds.org> To set an alpha-level different from 0.05, you can specify ‘options(celebrate.alpha = <value>)’ • fanfare: user primordiality, <https://www.freesound.org/people/primordiality/sounds/78823/> (CC BY 3.0) • trombone: user kirbydx, <https://www.freesound.org/people/kirbydx/sounds/175409/> (CC0) Examples: ## Not run: m1 <- lm(speed~dist,cars) m2 <- lm(Income~Population,data.frame(state.x77)) summary(m1) summary(m2) ## chi-squared test M <- as.table(rbind(c(762, 327, 468), c(484, 239, 477))) dimnames(M) <- list(gender = c("F", "M"), party = c("Democrat","Independent", "Republican")) (Xsq <- chisq.test(M)) # Prints test summary boring <- matrix(c(6,5,4,5), nrow = 2) (chisq.test(boring)) ## End(Not run)

#lirpaloof Since it's already 2025-04-01 for most of the world ... a slightly updated version of the `celebrate` package: `remotes::install_github("bbolker/bbmisc/celebrate")`. (Description: Celebrate your successes and mourn your failures.) Now supports `htest` objects!

GLMM meme: cat on left licking himself labeled GLM; tiger on right in same posture labeled GLMM

this is your brain [egg] this is regression [frying pan] this is your brain on regression [egg frying in pan] any questions?

elton john meme: RESULTS SECTION (left) METHODS SECTION (right)

terminator meme: What's your mom's job? STATISTICIAN Is it okay to replace missing values with zeros? Sure honey that sounds fine Your foster parents are dead

Did you know that all the fine artisanal memes from my stats lectures are available in the course repo? Reuse and remixing freely encouraged github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Dive into stat modeling&applications, relaxing assumptions, predictive accuracy, preserving information, imputation, model validation, Bayesian models, causal specification+many controversial topics: Regression Modeling Strategies course May 15-16, 19-20 hbiostat.org/doc/rms/4day.html #StatsSky

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

Happy 30th birthday year to SPM!! 🎈🍰

To get the party started, we are delighted to announce SPM 25.01, a major new version of the open-source neuroimaging software.

Read the preprint to discover what's new arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12081 and download SPM for free from Github github.com/spm/spm/rele...

A notice with a buff coloured background and bold dark brown printing in capital letters, pinned to a dark grey-green coloured door. The word REFUSE is in larger print than the rest of the notice. The notice reads: REFUSE TO BE STORED IN BLACK PLASTIC SACKS AND PLACED IN THE CONTAINERS PROVIDED.

REFUSE.

(lexical stress)

7 steps to junk science that can achieve worldly success
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/01/17/7...

 “people won’t take us seriously if we speak plainly about what we’re doing, so we have to smoke and mirror some fake math at them to get them to show us respect”.

When I was a young man there were whispered rumors among the elders that they could remember their own elders talking about a time when getting grants had been a means for doing science, rather than vice versa.

The Start-Up Scholar - The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences Join us for an interactive workshop that has been designed to help PhD candidates, Postdoctoral Fellows and Early Career Researchers plan their careers using a start-up framework.

Are you an early career researcher at @uio.no? Next Wednesday at 1pm I’ll be running a career development workshop for UiO ECRs, in which I’ll cover how a “start-up of one” mindset can be used for navigating academic careers.

For more details ⬇️

a cartoon of minnie mouse sitting at a desk holding a pencil and a cup of coffee Alt: a cartoon of minnie mouse sitting at a desk holding a pencil and a cup of coffee

Yearly reminder that the world will not end if you don’t submit your paper or revision before the holidays.

Editors are people too & need a break. The @plosbiology.org team in particular has done outstanding work this year & fully deserves it. We’re mostly off the next 2 weeks.

Happy holidays!

New paper alert! Our paper 'Charting the shared genetic architecture of Alzheimer's disease, cognition, and educational attainment, and associations with brain development' is out in Neurobiology of Disease!
@SFFNORMENT

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Brain Connectivity Workshop 2025 will be held just before #OHBM2025 on the paradise that is Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) a one hour ferry ride from Brisbane

Registration will open shortly (cost to be <$600 for travel registration & accomodation) so please plan your flights accordingly

Check out services like SendMyBags. Might be useful/cheaper to send bags over (if you have a destination address)

Short answer: they don’t!
Long answer: unfortunately, it implies leaving behind/getting rid of all sorts of things (including cherished possessions) 😞
P.S: I did move to Norway with only two suitcases (plus two laptop bags: one with actual laptop, the other with my hard disks!)