Brain Star - August 15, 2003 - Biosketch

Name:
Jason Connolly

I completed an undergraduate degree (B.A.) in Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. As an undergraduate, I completed the Research Apprenticeship Program under the supervision of Dr. Brian Timney, an expert in binocular vision, and I completed my Honours thesis with Dr. Melvyn Goodale, now a Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience, in a project investigating the role of visual feedback of the limb on reaching and grasping. I completed an M.Sc. in Neuroscience, again at the University of Western Ontario, under the co-supervision of Dr. Goodale and Dr. Tutis Vilis, a neurophysiologist specializing in oculomotor control. During my M.Sc., I became familiar with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a research tool for investigating the cortical substrates of eye and limb movement. I am currently in the fourth year of a doctoral program in Neuroscience under the co-supervision of Dr. Goodale and Dr. Douglas Munoz, a Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience at Queens University. I have also successfully collaborated with Dr. Richard Andersen (Caltech, U.S.A.) on a project investigating the human homologues of monkey cortical areas involved in saccades and reaching. My Doctoral research generally concerns the functional architectures of the cortical control of saccades and reaching. In particular, I am studying the cortical physiology of antisaccades, a type of eye movement that is affected following onset of schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and several other disorders of the frontal lobes. It is thus hoped that the investigation of the physiology underlying anti-saccades will not only provide basic insights into the cortical substrates of higher-order motor planning and control, but will also provide clues as to the brain circuitry that is selectively affected during the pathophysiology of these illnesses.