Neurosalience #S2E20 - Turning the microphone around on Peter Bandettini

Over the thirty-nine episodes of this podcast, Peter Bandettini, PhD (twitter: @fmri_today), has guided interesting conversations with brain scientists of all types about the latest developments, controversies, findings, and challenges in the field of brain mapping. Of course, Dr. Bandettini is an impressive and fascinating scientist in his own right, so we on the Neurosalience production team thought it was time to turn things around and shine the spotlight on Peter.

About our "guest": Dr. Bandettini is Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core Facility and Director of the Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging. Peter received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Marquette University and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts General Hospital Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and Harvard Medical School, before returning to the Medical College of Wisconsin as assistant professor. In 1999, Dr. Bandettini moved to the National Institute of Mental Health, where he has been ever since.

As of this recording, his research has been cited almost 44,000 times, with 5 of his papers having over 2000 citations, 10 papers with over 1000 citations, and 20 with over 500 citations. Dr. Bandettini has also written the book on functional MRI published by MIT Press, entitled, appropriately, “fMRI”.

Peter has been highly involved in the Organization for Human Brain Mapping since essentially the beginning, including serving as President, Program Chair, and scientific advisory board member. Peter is also a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, where he was awarded the ISMRM Gold Medal in 2020, and he was previously the editor-in-chief of the journal NeuroImage, along with serving as associate editor for that journal and many others.

Through all of this, Dr. Bandettini has advised numerous grad students and postdocs, some of whom you’ll hear about in today’s episode. We’ll hear about Peter’s approach to mentorship, to science in general, and to science communication, and to much, much more.

About our guest host: Kevin Sitek, PhD, is a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Kevin joined the OHBM Communications Committee in 2020 and has worked with the Neurosalience production team since the podcast started in early 2021. You can find Kevin on twitter at @krsitek.