BMI Distinguished Seminar // Manish Saggar: Mapping and Modeling Individual Human Brain Dynamics: From Measurement to Perturbation

Understanding how psychiatric disorders are instantiated in the brain at the level of an individual remains a fundamental challenge for human neuroscience. In this talk, I will describe a computational framework that approaches this problem across several levels—from measurement and modeling to experimental design and neurobiological validation. I will show how topological data analysis can reveal the structure and dynamics of individual brain-state trajectories, and how biophysical network models can help connect these empirical observations to underlying mechanisms. I will then discuss how naturalistic experiments and data-driven approaches to psychiatric nosology can provide richer and more biologically grounded characterizations of individual variation. Finally, I will present emerging work using pharmacological, neurostimulatory, and internally generated perturbations to ask a forward-looking question: can an individual’s capacity for neural change itself become a measurable phenotype?