Aaron F Alexander-bloch, MD, PhD, MPhil

faculty photo
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Attending Psychiatrist, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Department: Psychiatry
Graduate Group Affiliations

Contact information
Richards Biomedical Research Laboratories, B504
3700 Hamilton Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Education:
AB (Philosophy)
Harvard College, 2006.
MPhil (Computational Biology)
University of Cambridge, 2008.
PhD (Neuroscience)
University of Cambridge, 2013.
MD
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, 2015.
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Description of Research Expertise

Dr Alexander-Bloch investigates normal brain development and the altered developmental trajectories that lead to mental illness, using a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates brain imaging, genomics and clinical information. The lab team's goal is to translate the highly polygenic risk for psychosis and other neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders into pathophysiologic mechanisms, to inform therapeutic targets and improve risk assessment. Current projects include: 1) Lifespan trajectory models of post-mortem brain gene expression and brain MRI morphological features (n=100,000 scans including shared and open data); 2) Influence of copy number variants and polygenic risk on brain development and psychiatric risk, in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort; 3) Analysis of clinically-acquired brain MRI at CHOP and integration with natural language processing of physician notes from electronic health record; 4) Transcriptome-wide association study of neuroimaging phenotypes in the UK Biobank. Rotation Projects are available within the scope of each of the above projects.

Selected Publications

Alexander-Bloch A, Huguet G, Schultz LM, Huffnagle N, Jacquemont S, Seidlitz J, Saci Z, Moore TM, Bethlehem RAI, Mollon J, Knowles EK, Raznahan A, Merikangas A, Chaiyachati BH, Raman H, Schmitt JE, Barzilay R, Calkins ME, Shinohara RT, Satterthwaite TD, Gur RC, Glahn DC, Almasy L, Gur RE, Hakonarson H, Glessner J.: Copy Number Variant Risk Scores Associated With Cognition, Psychopathology, and Brain Structure in Youths in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. JAMA Psychiatry 79: 699-709, Jul 2022.

Hu F, Weinstein SM, Baller EB, Valcarcel AM, Adebimpe A, Raznahan A, Roalf DR, Robert-Fitzgerald TE, Gonzenbach V, Gur RC, Gur RE, Vandekar S, Detre JA, Linn KA, Alexander-Bloch A, Satterthwaite TD, Shinohara RT.: Voxel-wise intermodal coupling analysis of two or more modalities using local covariance decomposition. Hum Brain Mapp Jun 2022.

Pines AR, Larsen B, Cui Z, Sydnor VJ, Bertolero MA, Adebimpe A, Alexander-Bloch AF, Davatzikos C, Fair DA, Gur RC, Gur RE, Li H, Milham MP, Moore TM, Murtha K, Parkes L, Thompson-Schill SL, Shanmugan S, Shinohara RT, Weinstein SM, Bassett DS, Fan Y, Satterthwaite TD.: Dissociable multi-scale patterns of development in personalized brain networks. Nat Commun 13: 2647, May 2022.

Schabdach J, Ceschin R, Schmithorst V, Tisdall MD, Alexander-Bloch A, Panigrahy A.: A Descriptive Review of the Impact of Patient Motion in Early Childhood Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Diagnostics (Basel) 12: 1032, Apr 2022.

Baller EB, Valcarcel AM, Adebimpe A, Alexander-Bloch A, Cui Z, Gur RC, Gur RE, Larsen BL, Linn KA, O'Donnell CM, Pines AR, Raznahan A, Roalf DR, Sydnor VJ, Tapera TM, Tisdall MD, Vandekar S, Xia CH, Detre JA, Shinohara RT, Satterthwaite TD.: Developmental coupling of cerebral blood flow and fMRI fluctuations in youth. Cell Rep 38: 110576, Mar 2022.

Murtha K, Larsen B, Pines A, Parkes L, Moore TM, Adebimpe A, Bertolero M, Alexander-Bloch A, Calkins ME, Davila DG, Lindquist MA, Mackey AP, Roalf DR, Scott JC, Wolf DH, Gur RC, Gur RE, Barzilay R, Satterthwaite TD.: Associations between neighborhood socioeconomic status, parental education, and executive system activation in youth. Cereb Cortex Mar 2022.

Larsen B, Cui Z, Adebimpe A, Pines A, Alexander-Bloch A, Bertolero M, Calkins ME, Gur RE, Gur RC, Mahadevan AS, Moore TM, Roalf DR, Seidlitz J, Sydnor VJ, Wolf DH, Satterthwaite TD.: A developmental reduction of the excitation:inhibition ratio in association cortex during adolescence. Sci Adv 8: eabj8750, Feb 2022.

Bethlehem RAI, Seidlitz J, White SR, Vogel JW, Anderson KM, Adamson C, Adler S, Alexopoulos GS, Anagnostou E, Areces-Gonzalez A, Astle DE, Auyeung B, Ayub M, Bae J, Ball G, Baron-Cohen S, Beare R, Bedford SA, Benegal V, Beyer F, Blangero J, Blesa Cábez M, Boardman JP, Borzage M, Bosch-Bayard JF, Bourke N, Calhoun VD, Chakravarty MM, Chen C, Chertavian C, Chetelat G, Chong YS, Cole JH, Corvin A, Costantino M, Courchesne E, Crivello F, Cropley VL, Crosbie J, Crossley N, Delarue M, Delorme R, Desrivieres S, Devenyi GA, Di Biase MA, Dolan R, Donald KA, Donohoe G, Dunlop K, Edwards AD, Elison JT, Ellis CT, Elman JA, Eyler L, Fair DA, Feczko E, Fletcher PC, Fonagy P, Franz CE, Galan-Garcia L, Gholipour A, Giedd J, Gilmore JH, Glahn DC, Goodyer IM, Grant PE, Groenewold NA, Gunning FM, Gur RE, Gur RC, Hammill CF, Hansson O, Hedden T, Heinz A, Henson RN, Heuer K, Hoare J, Holla B, Holmes AJ, Holt R, Huang H, Im K, Ipser J, Jack CR Jr, Jackowski AP, Jia T, Johnson KA, Jones PB, Jones DT, Kahn RS, Karlsson H, Karlsson L, Kawashima R, Kelley EA, Kern S, Kim KW, Kitzbichler MG, Kremen WS, Lalonde F, Landeau B, et al.: Brain charts for the human lifespan. Nature 2022.

Mandal AS, Romero-Garcia R, Seidlitz J, Hart MG, Alexander-Bloch AF, Suckling J.: Lesion covariance networks reveal proposed origins and pathways of diffuse gliomas. Brain Commun 3: fcab289, Dec 2021.

Schmitt JE, DeBevits JJ, Roalf DR, Ruparel K, Gallagher RS, Gur RC, Alexander-Bloch A, Eom TY, Alam S, Steinberg J, Akers W, Khairy K, Crowley TB, Emanuel B, Zakharenko SS, McDonald-McGinn DM, Gur RE.: A Comprehensive Analysis of Cerebellar Volumes in the 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome. Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging Nov 2021.

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Last updated: 07/14/2022
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