Tomas Paus

During the first 20 years of his scientific pursuits, Dr. Paus worked on functional and structural organization of the human cerebral cortex using a variety of approaches including studies of patients with brain lesions, functional and structural neuroimaging, and brain stimulation.

In the last 15+ years, his work integrates epidemiology, neuroscience and genetics – through a new discipline of population neuroscience - in the pursuit of knowledge relevant for child and youth brain health. This research draws on data acquired in a number of cohorts based in North and South America and Europe.

The work published by Dr. Paus and his colleagues has been well received by peers, being cited in over 54,000 publications (h-index: 111). In 2013, Springer published his book “Population Neuroscience”.

Dr. Paus has contributed to the field of neuroscience in two ways. First, he has introduced a number of innovations for studying the human brain, including a) voxel-wise analyses of structural brain images (Science 1999); b) combining brain stimulation and imaging (Journal of Neuroscience 1997); and c) integrating epidemiology, genetics and brain imaging (Population Neuroscience 2013). Second, he has provided new framework for understanding the function of the anterior cingulate cortex (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2001), and the processes underlying changes in white matter during adolescence and their significance for axonal transport (Journal of Neuroscience 2008, NeuroImage 2015).

In his current work, Dr. Paus extends his core expertise in systems neuroscience to other levels of analyses, both down to the molecular level (omics) and up to the community level (geospatial mapping of physical and social environments).