A conversation with Dr. Joana Cabral (OHBM 2025 Keynote Interview Series)
Author: Ashley Tyrer
Editors: Kevin Sitek, Simon Steinkamp
Next up in our Keynote Lecture Interview series is Dr. Joana Cabral, who is a principal investigator at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho, Portugal, funded by a La Caixa Junior Leader Fellowship. She also holds visiting positions at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom; at the Shemesh Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal; and also at the Centre for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University, Denmark.
With a background in medical engineering, Dr. Cabral specialises in the development of large-scale brain models and advanced analytical tools to study resting-state brain activity in both health and disease. One of her key contributions is the LEiDA algorithm (Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis), developed in 2017, which has been instrumental in identifying dynamic features of whole-brain activity linked to cognitive and behavioural conditions.
Dr. Cabral brings a novel, physics-based perspective to neuroimaging, blending experimental and theoretical approaches. Her work incorporates brain network models with oscillatory dynamics, and her experimental studies in rodents have demonstrated how resonant waves can drive correlations between distant brain regions, offering new insights into the organising principles of brain networks.
By using synthetic network models to simulate the complex interactions among neural populations, Dr. Cabral aims to replicate the spatio-temporal patterns observed in the resting human brain. These patterns, often disrupted in mental illness, offer a window into both our identity and the biological roots of psychiatric conditions. Dr. Cabral has received many awards in recognition of her contributions, including the L’Oréal Award for Women in Science Portugal in 2019.
Dr. Cabral holds both a MSc and BSc degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Faculty of Science and Technology, Nova University in Lisbon, Portugal. She then obtained her PhD in 2012 in Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain, supervised by Prof. Dr. Gustavo Deco.
We had the huge honour of speaking with Dr. Cabral about her career path so far, her recent work on metastability, and some words of advice for aspiring researchers. In this interview, she gave us a taster of the content of her keynote lecture at OHBM Brisbane 2025 and discussed the importance of a constantly evolving research landscape in which our research can be proved incorrect, even by our future selves!
Watch the interview below, or follow the link: https://youtu.be/pcKD4KbDzBo