In this inaugural episode, I speak with one of the world’s foremost experts in neuroimaging and brain connectomics, Dr Boris Bernhard, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroinformatics. Dr Bernhardt is the Principal Investigator at the Multimodal Imaging and Connectome Analysis (MICA) Lab situated at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute (aka, The Neuro). He is also my friend and professional colleague, having served as my thesis supervisor during my PhD studies at McGill University.

His lab investigates how the organization of structural and functional brain networks supports integrated cognition in both healthy individuals and those with disorders, particularly epilepsy and autism. His team has played a key role in recent conceptual and methodological breakthroughs for mapping spatial patterns in the brain as continuous gradients—especially hierarchical ones that span from sensory-motor regions to higher-order transmodal systems responsible for associative processing. His research routinely combines multimodal neuroimaging, network neuroscience, 3D histology, and transcriptomics.

On this occasion, Dr Bernhardt and I discuss a recently published paper by his lab in Nature Communications, titled Multimodal gradients unify local and global cortical organization. We break down how brain function is situated at the nexus of local and global cortical dynamics.