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• Our Funding

About us

The Neuroimaging Core (NIC) of the Center for Neurobiology of Stress (CNS) was formally established in 2003 with the support of a Mind Body Center infrastructure grant from the National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine (NCCAM) and a Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) from NIDDK. The NIC provides a wide range of services for CNS investigators and affiliated programs. The majority of NIC activities are related to studying the activity, connectivity and structural changes in central circuitries in health and in different chronic pain and stress-sensitive disorders.

The NIC grew rapidly, and is now interacting with investigators within the CNS, UCLA at large, and extramural educational and private institutions. The program is funded by various NIH, private foundation, and industry sponsored grants (See the grants section for more detail). The program is led by Dr. Mayer (Director), Dr. Bruce Naliboff (Co-director) and Jennifer Labus (Associate Director, and head of the connectivity and computational modeling section).

The CNS NIC is currently housed in approximately 1,500 sq ft of renovated office space in the Peter V Ueberroth Building, and will be moving into 5,000 sqft of renovated space in the Center for Health Sciences (CHS) building in early 2010. The majority of collaborators directly associated with the CNS have their offices in the same location, which facilitates interactions amongst primary investigators, co-investigators and consultants.

The NIC interacts closely with the UCLA Brain Mapping Center (BMC) and the UCLA Laboratory of Neuroimaging (LONI). It maintains strong and rapidly developing links with clinicians, clinical researchers, and basic researchers within the UCLA community. The goal of these interactions is to take advantage of the vast neuroimaging infrastructure and expertise at UCLA (BMC) and affiliated institutions (VA PET Center) in terms of high resolution imaging devices (fMRI, PET, EEG) for the study of functional and structural brain characteristics in humans and animal models, radioligand development for PET studies, large scale repository for structural brain scans (LONI) and data acquisition and analysis techniques. many of our investigators have dual appointments in the departments of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Psychology, and are closely linked with other researchers in biochemistry, physiology, computer science, mathematics, electrical and biomedical engineering.

The NIC has extensive expertise in state-of-the-art functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) data acquisition.  We employ various functional and structural analysis techniques such as statistical parametric mapping (e.g., SPM, FSL) and brain network analyses (e.g., partial least squares (PLS) and structural equation modeling (SEM), multidimensional scaling (MDS), independent components analysis (ICA)). We have recently broadened our neuroimaging expertise to include other MR-related measures of brain structure and function, such as Resting State Activity, Diffusion Tractography (DTI), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), high-resolution structural imaging, and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). See the Methodology section for more information on these and other analysis techniques. The Neuroimaging Core has a long-standing relationship with the UCLA Brain Mapping Center (BMC) and the UCLA Laboratory for Neuroimaging (LONI) which enables us to use their neuroimaging scanners and stimulation methods, as well as develop a multicenter repository for structural and resting state data from different centers across the country.

Our Funding

Public Funding:
National Institutes of Health: NIDDK, NCCAM, NIMH, NIDA

Industry Sponsors:

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
Avera Pharmaceuticals
Proctor & Gamble
Johnson & Johnson
Dannon
Eil Lilly Pharmaceuticals
Novartis Pharmaceuticals