Dr. Heidi Johansen-Berg
Director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging University of Oxford
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience University of Oxford
Postdoctoral/Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellow University of Oxford
PhD in Neuroscience University of Oxford
As a child, Dr. Heidi Johansen-Berg had no interest in science. She found it rather boring and took as few science classes as she possibly could, favoring more adventurous and creative, artistic endeavors. While the behavior of her fellow humans had always piqued her interest, it was only when Heidi took psychology in university that she realized neuroscience might begin to answer some of humanity's most fundamental questions. This set her on a new trajectory that school-aged Heidi would never have envisioned for herself: getting a master’s and PhD in neuroscience, working extensively with mathematicians and engineers to develop novel methods for imaging the human brain, studying brain plasticity across species, and directing her own research group as well as of multiple prestigious Neuroscience centers at the University of Oxford.
Heidi’s transition from the arts and humanities to science wasn’t immediate. She initially studied philosophy as well as psychology at university, but when philosophy’s introspective nature began to lose its appeal, she dropped it to focus on experimental psychology. Heidi continued to move deeper into the sciences and eventually entered a combined master’s and PhD program at Oxford. It was then that she had the opportunity to try out a number of different types of neuroscience research - physiology, neuroimmunology, etc. - and began to fill in some of the gaps in her science background created by her childhood aversion to those fields. Heidi also credits those research rotations with showing her a lot of what she didn’t want to do; she found she preferred a more cognitive neuroscience line of research, away from the bench.
For her PhD, Heidi worked with Dr. Paul Matthews to study how people recover motor function following stroke using a wide array of techniques. She used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to follow stroke patients undergoing rehabilitation and understand which parts of the brain are recruited and reorganized during successful recovery. She also utilized transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - a method of transiently and non-invasively perturbing brain activity - to determine how disrupting sites of reorganization affected patients’ ability to move. Even while Heidi made a number of exciting discoveries during her PhD about the brain’s remarkable ability to change and adapt to injury, there were other lines of research she pursued that didn’t pan out, such as a whole other project working with Multiple sclerosis patients. At the time, this was difficult for Heidi to grapple with - that so much time and effort had gone to waste - but now she takes a different perspective. “It’s the experience of doing the PhD that’s the valuable thing, and all of those skills that you learn along the way - even with all the failures.”
To follow up on her doctoral work, Heidi decided that she wanted to take a deeper dive into cognitive neuroscience methods. She thus stayed at Oxford for her postdoc as a Wellcome Trust Training Fellow in mathematical biology, collaborating closely with mathematicians, engineers, biologists and psychologists alike. Through this work, Heidi was a key figure in developing methods for diffusion tractography (also known as DTI). This involved using diffusion imaging - a non-invasive type of brain imaging that is sensitive to the direction of water diffusion within axons - to trace white matter pathways in the brain. Thus, this technique enabled Heidi to visualize the physical connections between brain areas in living humans, and even look at how those connections change under different circumstances.
These advances in non-invasive human brain imaging opened up a trove of new and exciting questions for Heidi to answer as she began to establish her own independence at Oxford. And that opportunity came sooner than she might have expected. When Heidi’s thesis advisor Dr. Matthews - whom she had continued to work closely with throughout her postdoc - moved institutions, she inherited his research group. Thus, Heidi’s transition from postdoc to PI was much more sudden than for most people; she abruptly found herself with a large group under her direction, including about six students and postdocs. This presented an exciting opportunity, but also a steep learning curve. While at first it was necessary to wrap up some of the Matthews lab’s ongoing projects, over time she was able to start pursuing her own questions, molding the research program and group in her own vision.
With her expanded expertise in state-of-the-art neuroimaging methods, Heidi was eager to return to some of the big, unanswered questions about how the brain changes with experience or injury that had interested her since her PhD. Using the diffusion tractography methods she had helped develop, her group was the first to demonstrate white matter plasticity in the human brain. Her lab has continued to study white matter plasticity in many different ways - in the context of learning and experience, but also in healthy development, disease and stroke. More recently, her group has also started working with rodents so that they can apply the same neuroimaging methods they use with humans while also examining underlying changes - in protein and gene expression, for instance - that simply aren’t accessible in their living human subjects. This can help them better understand the microscale underpinnings of the macroscale structural changes they observe with human neuroimaging. While it was challenging to venture into a new line of research that she didn’t personally have experience in, Heidi notes how she has come to learn that trusting others’ expertise and delegating are crucial aspects of being a PI.
Even as Heidi found her passion for science, she has continued to cultivate her other interests as well. She especially enjoys doing education outreach in her community, which has provided an outlet for exercising her “artsy side” while sharing her science. For instance, she was part of a group that developed a short play about the history of human neuroimaging that they perform at local outreach events. And on top of being both artsy and science-y, Heidi is also sporty. She used to play football (aka soccer) and currently enjoys coaching her daughter’s football team. Even though her younger self may never have foreseen where she is today, she would have had every reason to be excited for the life of scientific discovery ahead.
Find out more about the exciting research in Heidi’s lab here.
Listen to Cristiana’s full interview with Heidi on October 2nd, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
