Colin Buchanan
Research Associate
- Psychology
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: Colin.Buchanan@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room F1, Psychology Building
- City
- 7 George Square, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JZ
Background
Colin is based in the Lothian Birth Cohorts team within the Department of Psychology. He works with neuroimaging data from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, Generation Scotland, and the UK Biobank as part of a 5-year NIH grant to investigate the brain's structural connectivity and its relationships with cognitive function, health, and genetics.
Research summary
Colin specialises in neuroimaging and the study of the structural connectome, which seeks to map the connections within the brain as a network. By using imaging data from diffusion MRI and whole-brain tractography, connectome methods are used to map the collective wiring of many billions of axonal nerve fibres (white matter) across the brain. This approach provides the tools to ask neuroscientific questions related to both healthy and pathological brain organisation.
Colin's research has focused on developing connectome methods and investigating the relationships between brain networks, ageing, cognitive function, and genetics. A central aspect of his work involves evaluating the limitations of MRI-based brain measurements, including the reliability of connectome data. He has also taken a leading role in connectome processing for large-scale studies, such as the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, Generation Scotland, and the UK Biobank, contributing to numerous publications on cognitive ageing and mental health.