Multiscale Neurodevelopment Across Adolescence: Methods, Principles and Predictions

Abstract

Adolescence is a period of rapid neurobiological reorganisation that is central to the maturation of cognition and marks the peak window of vulnerability for psychiatric illness. Yet the fine-grained developmental processes that shape functional organisation of the human brain—and their relevance for mental health—have remained difficult to study in the living human brain.

First, I will present recent methodological work introducing neuroanatomically informed, multimodal MRI approaches designed to sensitively probe microscale features of cortical organisation during development. These methods enable in vivo characterisation of intracortical and hierarchical properties that have been historically largely inaccessible to conventional MRI.

Second, I will show how these tools reveal foundational principles of brain organisation, demonstrating how local microstructural variation constrains large-scale functional dynamics and supports the emergence of functional diversity and complexity.

Third, I will turn to new translational work addressing a major challenge in psychiatric neuroscience: distinguishing pathological trajectories from normative developmental change. Using longitudinal predictive modelling, I will present preliminary evidence on a novel forecasting framework that infers future neurodevelopmental trajectories at an individual level from only baseline data.

Together, these studies demonstrate our group’s multi-scale neurodevelopmental framework, with which we aim to better understand the dynamic and heterogeneous processes that unfold across adolescence, and how they contribute to psychopathology.