A conversation with Dr. Lucina Q. Uddin (OHBM 2025 Keynote Interview Series)

Authors: Tara Chand & Alfie Wearn

Professor Lucina Q. Uddin is a leading figure in the world of human brain mapping. Her work focuses on disentangling large-scale brain networks: how they work, and what happens when they develop differently  in neurodevelopmental conditions. Her work combines functional and structural MRI to investigate mechanisms of executive function and cognitive flexibility. She is a strong voice in the OHBM for the community for more equitable publishing practices, as well as supporting diversity and inclusivity within academia.

Professor Uddin received her PhD from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Psychology Department before conducting a postdoctoral fellowship at the Child Study Center at New York University. She was later appointed as a Psychiatry & Behavioural Science Faculty Member at Stanford University, before returning to UCLA, where she now serves as director of the Brain Connectivity and Cognition Laboratory and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis Core in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Dr Uddin has been a greatly influential member of OHBM for many years. She was awarded the OHBM Early Career Investigator Award in 2017 and Diversity & Inclusivity Champion Award in 2021.

We are delighted that Professor Uddin took the time to sit down with us for this interview in advance of her Keynote Lecture at this year’s annual meeting. 

Tara Chand [TC]: If someone met you randomly on the street and asked, "What do you do?", how would you explain your work?

Lucina Uddin [LU]: I think the best way to describe what I do is that I study the brain, just like everyone else here at OHBM. I try to figure out how it works, how it develops, and what's going on in individuals who are diagnosed with different neurodevelopmental conditions. Basically, I try to figure out how the brain works.

TC: What brought you into brain research, especially given your family background in art and literature? Can you also share a bit about your journey from Bangladesh to California?

LU: I heard the myth that we only use 10% of our brains, and I thought, wow, that’s interesting—I wonder what the other 90% is doing. I was probably around 10 years old and didn’t understand what studying the brain meant. But that curiosity stuck. I think that’s the benefit of myths, even if they’re wrong, they get people thinking. Of course, we use much more than 10%, and that question has stayed with me ever since I decided to pursue neuroscience.

I came to the U.S. as an infant when my father immigrated  to pursue  a PhD in comparative literature. No one in my family was a scientist. I was expected to go to medical school, like my sister, but at some point, I just realized I don’t want to do that. It was more a process of elimination: because I was so interested in the brain and neuroscience, I followed that path into grad school, then a postdoc, and eventually a faculty job, which took years and persistence to land.

TC: Your work focuses on cognitive and behavioral flexibility. Can you describe your contribution to this system, and what happens when it doesn’t work properly?

LU: I think a lot of people became familiar with the importance of flexibility during the COVID pandemic. We went from in-person meetings to Zoom or from classroom teaching to teaching from home. Everything changed fast, and that was stressful for some people and types of work. But we face the need to be flexible in everyday life too, like when your car won’t start, and you have to figure out a new way to get to work.

In my work with autistic children, I focus on how the brain enables—or fails to enable—that kind of adaptability. For example, a child might have a meltdown just because their favorite yellow socks are in the laundry. So it’s always been a goal for me to understand how the brain supports flexible behaviours, how that develops over the lifespan, and how we can better support individuals, especially in conditions like autism, where flexibility is often impaired.

Once you get to some basic mechanisms, you can then use more targeted models to test hypotheses about how a particular  type of neurotransmitter manipulation would change flexibility—things you can't easily do in humans but can more easily do in animal models. For example, disruptions in the salience network—specifically in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex—are found not just in autism but across many psychiatric and neurological conditions. So instead of chasing disorder-specific effects, I focus on domain-general brain systems that underlie broad cognitive functions like attention and salience detection, which is also why I think basic neuroscience is so important.

TC: You proposed a best practices committee for large-scale brain network nomenclature. Why was this necessary, and what challenges did you encounter?

LU: I was interested in the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate;they seemed to form this network of co-activation and connectivity. I started to notice people were calling it different things. Some colleagues called it the salience network, others the cingulo-opercular network, and some referred to it as the ventral attention network. I realized the naming conventions were idiosyncratic and probably hindered progress. If you’re calling something three different names, people can’t do a proper literature search to find what’s common. So I wrote a more theoretical or opinion paper with Thomas Yeo and Nathan Spreng, suggesting we develop an overarching taxonomy: How many networks there are, what we call them, and what brain regions they include. I thought, how hard could it be? But it turns out it’s nearly impossible, because you first have to decide what a network even is, how to define it, and what types of data and imaging modalities should count.

We formed a best practices group of about 25 of us. Some did brain parcellations, some worked with independent component analysis , and we even added a philosopher to tackle the foundational questions. We met over Zoom for years. I thought we’d reach a consensus and publish a new atlas, but that never happened. We couldn’t agree on the basics. It’s almost an ill-posed question: how many brain regions are there? It depends on how you carve it up. So there wasn’t a simple solution. Instead, we decided the best we could do was offer tools to help people translate between findings. So we created the Network Correspondence Toolbox. It’s been online for a while and is now published. We just hope people use it. 

TC: You’re a vocal advocate for open science and a critic of traditional scientific publishing. What are the issues, and how can we tackle them?

LU: I think one of the biggest problems is the high cost of publishing. Some journals charge thousands of dollars—up to $12,000—for one article. That money could go toward a grad student’s salary, lab equipment, or scanner time. It just doesn’t make sense.

Another issue is finding reviewers. Nobody wants to review anymore because people get multiple requests every day, and it's not sustainable. As a handling editor, sometimes I have to ask 15 people just to get 3 to say yes. It’s inefficient and delays publication. One idea that keeps coming up is paying reviewers for their time, which isn’t crazy. We pay consultants all the time; why should this be any different? The real problem is that we, as researchers, have handed over too much control to the publishing industry. We do the work, get the funding, write the papers, and then pay them to publish them. We’ve created this system by chasing impact factors and flashy journals for career advancement. Now we’re stuck.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way. OHBM started its own journal, Aperture Neuro, with reduced fees and a different model. There are other creative solutions out there, we just need to reclaim some power. This is especially tough for researchers in lower-income countries, where article processing charges  aren’t covered by grants. Fee waivers or reviewer incentives could help. I’ve been part of editorial boards that have tried to initiate major changes—like when NeuroImage shifted to Imaging Neuroscience—and we need more bold moves like that. Congrats to Steve Smith for leading that, but we need more people willing to challenge the system.

TC: You have been contributing to OHBM in various roles over the years. Can you tell us about your journey in OHBM and how it has contributed to your academic growth?

LU: Yeah, I love OHBM! It’s my favorite conference. It’s such a fun conference with high-level science and a really welcoming, collaborative community from early career researchers to senior investigators. There are great events for first timers, like student and postdoc sessions, and the programming and social events are just amazing. In 2016, I joined the newly formed Diversity and Inclusivity Committee, thinking they could use help. We started the Diversity Symposium, which I’m proud to see still going strong. I also served on the program committee and was program chair when the conference was in Rome.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that OHBM takes diversity and global representation seriously, not as a box to check, but because it genuinely leads to better science. The most exciting findings I see each year come from OHBM members. It’s where the cutting-edge work in cognitive and network neuroscience really happens.

TC: With this diversity and inclusivity mission, what do you think is your main contribution? What are the challenges, and does the shifting political climate affect it? 

LU: Certainly in the United States, it's made us concerned about the future, and we're dealing with that in different ways. But I'm really happy to have been on the committee for many years, getting things started like the blog posts and the yearly symposium. All those events are now part of the main conference, and I’m glad they are still there. Things that make it easier for people to attend, like the childcare grants we’ve had for years, really help. You can apply for a lump sum to cover babysitters or an extra flight to bring a parent to help with the kids. We're just trying to make it easier for people to attend. We always think carefully about things like lowering fees and travel awards for people from lower and middle-income countries. There’s always been this commitment to making sure speakers aren’t all from one place. In symposia, you’ll see people from different institutions, parts of the world, and career stages. It’s not an old boys club—it’s a really great group of people. And yeah, I think you can feel the good energy at OHBM. It’s just a different kind of conference.

TC: What advice do you give for aspiring researchers?

LU: Advice: go to OHBM. I always give that advice. But also, figure out what kind of career you want. Do you want a huge lab with 10 postdocs, or something smaller like mine, a couple of grad students, maybe one postdoc, one grant at a time? You don’t have to do the big thing or the small thing, just what fits your lifestyle and goals. For me, it’s always been about collaboration. Probably 90% of our lab’s work is with co-authors at other institutions around the world. Team science is really the most effective, it brings together the right expertise. Most of my major collaborations started at OHBM, whether at a meeting or even a club night. It’s not just one discipline there. There are electrical engineers, biomedical engineers, computer scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, clinicians, overall just a broad mix. No single way of thinking dominates.

So yeah, for early career researchers, I know it’s tempting to focus on your own advancement—and that’s important—but one of the best ways to do that is through strong, mutual collaborations. The most high-impact papers from my lab have always come from those. So I always say: collaborate early and often.

TC: Can you give us a teaser or preview of your OHBM keynote lecture?

LU: I'm going to talk more about the network correspondence toolbox we just released, give some background, and maybe touch on the philosophical discussions we had over the years: why we think it's important in neuroscience and what the paths forward might be. One other important event coming up is a roundtable on the future of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. It’s a chance to hear from OHBM folks—how they’ve used the data, and what they think we should do in future data collection. As you probably know, ABCD is a big longitudinal study in the U.S. with about 10,000 kids being followed from age 9 to 20. I’m one of the associate directors, and we want more input from the community, especially on the neuroimaging side. 

Closing Remarks

Lucina Uddin: I just want to encourage folks—if you're coming to OHBM and feel like you don’t know anyone, you’ll be surprised how friendly and welcoming everyone is. Email people, go to their posters, and ask to meet for coffee. It’s not an exclusive club, everyone’s flattered when you reach out. There’s no barrier to entry; it’s the kind of meeting that’s what you make of it, so just jump in and enjoy it.

And that’s the great thing! You’ve got ComCom, the student-postdoc group, the Open Science SIG, all these different communities to get involved in. Before you know it, you’ve been going for almost 20 years. It starts to feel like a family reunion—except it’s a family you actually get along with. OHBM is really our chosen family.