Gaelle E. Doucet, Ph.D., is the Director of the Brain Architecture, Imaging and Cognition Laboratory. For the last 10 years, Dr. Doucet' 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), and particularly on 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 answering 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 the 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 on brain activity and cognition, from childhood to late adulthood.
Dr. Doucet has authored more than 45 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited more than 1000 times.
Education/Training
Oct 2017-Mar 2020: Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, NY, USA).
Oct 2015-Sep 2017: Postdoctoral fellow at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dpt. Of Psychiatry, at Dr. Sophia Frangou's lab (New York, NY, USA).
2011–Sep 2015: Postdoctoral fellow at Thomas Jefferson University, Dpts. of Neurology/Neurosurgery, at Dr. Joseph Tracy's lab (Philadelphia, PA, USA).
2007- Dec. 2010: Ph.D. Thesis in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Caen (France).
Topic: Study of the conscious resting state in functional imaging, including exploration of spontaneous cognition, spontaneous brain activity and their relationship. Grade: Very honourable distinction from the examination board. Scholarship granted by the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) & the local state government (Basse-Normandie).
2006-2007: Master in Neuropsychology. Graduated with Honors. Pierre Mendès-France University (Grenoble, France).
Selected Recent Publications:
G. E. Doucet*, D. Janiri*, M. Pompili, G. Sani, B. Luna, D. A. Brent, S. Frangou. (2020) Risk and protective factors for childhood suicidality in a US population-based sample. The Lancet Psychiatry. 7(4):317–326. * equal contribution
G. E. Doucet, M. J. Luber, P. Balchandani, I. E. Sommer, S. Frangou (2019) Abnormal auditory tonotopy in patients with schizophrenia. NPJ Psychiatry. 5:16.
G. E. Doucet, W. H. Lee, S. Frangou (2019) Evaluation of the spatial variability in the major resting-state networks across human brain functional atlases. Human Brain Mapping. 40:4577–4587.
G. E. Doucet, D. A. Moser, A. Rodrigue, D. S. Bassett, D. Glahn, S. Frangou. (2019) Person-based brain morphometric similarity is heritable and correlates with biological features. Cerebral Cortex. 29(2):852–862.
G. E. Doucet, N. Rasgon, B. S. McEwen, N. Micali and S. Frangou (2018) Elevated body mass index is associated with increased integration and reduced cohesion of sensory-driven and internally-guided resting-state functional brain networks. Cerebral Cortex 3(1):988-997.
G. E. Doucet*, D. A. Moser*, A. Ing, D. Dima, G. Schumann, R. Bilder and S. Frangou (2018) An integrated brain-behavior model for working memory. Molecular Psychiatry. 23(10):1974–1980. * equal contribution
G. E. Doucet, D. S. Bassett, N. Yao, D. C. Glahn and S. Frangou (2017) The role of intrinsic brain functional connectivity in vulnerability and resilience to bipolar disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry. 174(12):1214–1222.
G. E. Doucet, X. He, M. Sperling, A. Sharan, and J. Tracy (2017) From “rest" to language task: Task activation selects and prunes from broader resting-state network. Human Brain Mapping. 38(5):2540–2552.
G. Doucet, R. Rider, N. Taylor, C. Skidmore, A. Sharan, M. Sperling, and J. I. Tracy. (2015) Pre-surgery resting-state local graph-theory measures predict neurocognitive outcomes after brain surgery in temporal lobe epilepsy. Epilepsia. 56(4):517–526.
G. Doucet, D. Pustina, C. Skidmore, A. Sharan, M. Sperling, and J. Tracy. (2015) Resting-state functional connectivity predicts the strength of hemispheric lateralization for language processing in temporal lobe epilepsy and normals. Human Brain Mapping. 36(1):288–303.
G. Doucet, M. Naveau, L. Petit, L. Zago, F. Crivello, G. Jobard, N. Delcroix, E. Mellet, N. Tzourio-Mazoyer, B. Mazoyer and M. Joliot. (2012) Patterns of hemodynamic low-frequency oscillations in the brain are modulated by the nature of free thought during rest. Neuroimage 59(4):3194–3200. Received Best Publication Award at OHBM 2012.
G. Doucet, M. Naveau, L. Petit, N. Delcroix, L. Zago, F. Crivello, G. Jobard, N. Tzourio-Mazoyer, B. Mazoyer, E. Mellet and M. Joliot. (2011) Brain activity at rest: A multi-scale hierarchical functional organization. Journal of Neurophysiology 105(6):2753–63.
