 The overall goal of our work is to look at factors that help or harm the brain. So we all have a brain, we're all worried about what we can do best to improve our education or improve our health. So we do a whole range of imaging projects that look at factors that help the brain such as exercise and cardiovascular fitness, what types of things we should do to improve our brain and also how does these affect the brain. So we have a lot of projects looking at Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and HIV and understanding how those affect the brain too. Some of the biggest questions about our time are how are you treat disease? If you see a terrible disease such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease, one of the ways of seeing whether treatments are working and imaging, which is an area that NIVIB invests a great deal in, is really a good record of whether treatments are working. We're all familiar with going to the doctor and being told we're getting better or getting worse but imaging really gives you a physical picture of what's going on so that's an exciting area to study. There's a really new type of imaging called diffusion MRI and it basically looks at the wiring of the brain and so if you were flying over Los Angeles or over Bethesda you'd see a whole lot of freeways and you could probably guess what was going on down below. If you were on the ground you could see the functions of the different freeways and the different stores. This imaging takes us from a sort of bird's-eye view right down to the ground where you can see all of the physical connections between the axons and a lot of diseases disrupt those connections. So neurogenetic disorders of childhood, there's often disruptions in the migration of fibres and we can see those and diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, there's a loss of connections. So we're often able to reconstruct which parts of the brain are going wrong and look at some of the therapies that are able to help them. All over the world people are scanning people's brains right now so if we were to plan a project that scanned thousands or tens of thousands of people it'd be very costly and so one of the ways that we save money is we work with people around the world and one project we do called Enigma. We collect data from 125 sites around the world and they've been scanning people with schizophrenia, bipolar illness or depression. We try and put together a detailed picture of what those illnesses do to the brain and so it's actually quite an interesting project. All of these things were begun independently and all the data is coming to our lab. We're able to say which parts of the brain are affected by the diseases and which treatments help. We're all pretty unique so even if we have an average picture of Alzheimer's disease for example it'll just show you the typical way it spreads in the brain. Now that can be very useful because you can compare an individual to the database. You can say well you seem to be doing pretty well because the brain loss is going less rapidly than in the database of people of the same age. So I think the notion is that you can make comparative statements about a new person scan based on all the collected data from other people and that can be very reassuring.