Gaelle E. Doucet PhD

Gaelle E. Doucet, Ph.D., is the Director of the Brain Architecture, Imaging, and Cognition Laboratory. For the last 10 years, Dr. Doucet's research interests have involved the investigation of the brain's architecture and its relationship to cognition in health and disease. She is a cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in functional MRI (fMRI), particularly in resting-state fMRI. Her research has involved the use of multi-modal MRI to characterize the brain functional organization and she has applied this technology to answer questions about the impacts of disease on brain functional organization.

Dr. Doucet received her doctoral degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Caen (France) in 2010. Her work provided a description of the healthy brain intrinsic organization underlying the complex relationships between brain networks at rest in young adults. This finding offered one of the first schematic models of the brain's functional architecture and provided a normative framework for the study of intrinsic interactions between brain networks. During her postdoctoral fellowships, she further investigated the impact of neurological (i.e., epilepsy) and neuropsychiatric (i.e., schizophrenia and bipolar disorders) disorders on brain architecture.

Prior to joining Boys Town National Research Hospital, Dr. Doucet was an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, NY). She has been awarded a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to identify the brain networks in aging populations. This work aims to provide the first reliable brain functional atlas for older adults. By mapping the brain networks underlying late adulthood, this work has the potential to elucidate how dysfunction of the brain networks contributes to neurodegenerative conditions. At BTNRH, she plans to expand this research by focusing on age-related changes in brain activity and cognition, from childhood to late adulthood.