Aaron F Alexander-bloch, MD, PhD, MPhil
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
3700 Hamilton Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Publications
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.
Permanent linkAB (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.
Description of Clinical Expertise
PsychosisDescription 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
Schabdach, J.M., Schmitt, J.E., Sotardi, S., Vossough, A., Savvas, A., Roberts, T.P., Huang, H., Padmanabhan, V., Ortiz-Rosa, A., Gardner, M., Covitz, S., Bedord, S.A., Mandal, A., Chaiyachati, B., White, S.R., Bullmore, E.T., Bethlehem, R.A.I., Shinohara, R.T., Billot, B., Iglesias, J.E/, Ghosh, S., Gur, R.E., Satterthwaite, T.D., Roalf, D., Seidlitz, J., Alexander-Bloch, A.: Brain Growth Charts for Quantitative Analysis of Pediatric Clinical Brain MRI Scans with Limited Imaging Pathology. Radiology 309(1): e230096, October 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1148/radiol.230096.Sun, K., Keller, A., Barzilay, R., Moore, T., Almasy, L., Schultz, L.M., Satterthwaite, T., Fair, D., Alexander-Bloch, A.: Transdiagnostic polygenic risk, general psychopathology, and personalized functional brain networks in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort. Poster Presentation, Flux Congress: The Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Santa Rosa, CA September 2023.
Gardner, M., Alexander-Bloch, A., Shinohara, R., Schabdach, J., Dorfschmidt, L., Bethlehem, R., Seidlitz, J., Shanmugan, S.: Dynamic effects of sex on global brain volumes across the human lifespan. Poster Presentation, Flux Congress: The Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Santa Rosa, CA September 2023.
Hu F, Chen AA, Horng H, Bashyam V, Davatzikos C, Alexander-Bloch A, Li M, Shou H, Satterthwaite TD, Yu M, Shinohara RT.: Image harmonization: A review of statistical and deep learning methods for removing batch effects and evaluation metrics for effective harmonization. Neuroimage 274: 120125, Jul 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120125. Epub 2023 Apr 20.
Di Biase MA, Tian YE, Bethlehem RAI, Seidlitz J, Alexander-Bloch AF, Yeo BTT, Zalesky A.: Mapping human brain charts cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 120: e2216798120, May 2023.
Sydnor VJ, Larsen B, Seidlitz J, Adebimpe A, Alexander-Bloch AF, Bassett DS, Bertolero MA, Cieslak M, Covitz S, Fan Y, Gur RE, Gur RC, Mackey AP, Moore TM, Roalf DR, Shinohara RT, Satterthwaite TD.: Intrinsic activity development unfolds along a sensorimotor-association cortical axis in youth. Nat Neurosci 26(4): 638-649, April 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1038/s41593-023-01282-y. Epub 2023 Mar 27.
Williams JC, Ball M, Roscoe N, Harowitz J, Hobbs RJ, Raman HN, Seltzer MK, Vo LC, Cagande CC, Alexander-Bloch AF, Glahn DC, Morrow L.: Widening Racial Disparities During COVID-19 Telemedicine Transition: A Study of Child Mental Health Services at Two Large Children's Hospitals. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 62(4): 447-456, April 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1016/j.jaac.2022.07.848. Epub 2022 Nov 2.
Gray JP, Manuello J, Alexander-Bloch AF, Leonardo C, Franklin C, Choi KS, Cauda F, Costa T, Blangero J, Glahn DC, Mayberg HS, Fox PT.: Co-alteration Network Architecture of Major Depressive Disorder: A Multi-modal Neuroimaging Assessment of Large-scale Disease Effects. Neuroinformatics 21(2): 443-455, April 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1007/s12021-022-09614-2. Epub 2022 Dec 5.
Wong TY, Moore TM, Seidlitz J, Yuen KSL, Ruparel K, Barzilay R, Calkins ME, Alexander-Bloch AF, Satterthwaite TD, Gur RE, Gur RC.: Traumatic stress load and stressor reactivity score associated with accelerated gray matter maturation in youths indexed by normative models. Mol Psychiatry 28(3): 1137-1145, March 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1038/s41380-022-01908-w. Epub 2022 Dec 27.
Mollon J, Schultz LM, Huguet G, Knowles EEM, Mathias SR, Rodrigue A, Alexander-Bloch A, Saci Z, Jean-Louis M, Kumar K, Douard E, Almasy L, Jacquemont S, Glahn DC.: Impact of Copy Number Variants and Polygenic Risk Scores on Psychopathology in the UK Biobank. Biol Psychiatry 94(7): 591-600, Feb 2023 Notes: doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2023.01.028. Epub 2023 Feb 9.