We would like to let our community know that there will be a short summer pause in our regular online MCOS activities. This break offers an opportunity to rest, reflect, and prepare for an exciting new season ahead.
We look forward to returning in September 2026 with a fresh series of online talks, discussions, and community conversations. Thank you for your continued support and participation throughout the year. We wish everyone a relaxing and enjoyable summer holiday season and look forward to reconnecting with you soon.
Each month, we will feature a member of the MCWG and have a brief Q&A!
This month please enjoy our highlight of Dr Arianna Sala, member of the MCWG Steering Committee.
Dr Sala is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Liège, Belgium. She has a background in neuroscience and earned her PhD in Molecular Medicine from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Italy), where she investigated molecular biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease. After research stays at Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) and the Technical University of Munich (Germany), she joined the Coma Science Group to study brain molecular alterations in disorders of consciousness. Together with Igor Yakushev, she founded the Molecular Connectivity Working Group.
Dr Sala has graciously responded to our feature questionnaire:
What sparked your interest in molecular imaging or led you to focus on research in molecular imaging?
This happened a bit by chance – or luck! Strangely enough, I landed on molecular imaging because of brain connectivity.
During my Master’s studies, I became particularly interested in connectomics (kudos to Networks of the Brain by Olaf Sporns) and had the opportunity to work on a Master’s thesis on connectomics under the supervision of Daniela Perani and Silvia Caminiti.
The special aspect of this project was that connectomics was applied to molecular imaging data rather than the more “traditional” fMRI data. I did not know much of molecular imaging at the time, but I remember Professor Perani describing the project as “challenging”. I’ve always enjoyed a good challenge, so how could I say no?
From there (after attending a wonderful PET course with Federico Turkheimer and Mattia Veronese), things evolved quite naturally. Looking back, it was a fortunate series of opportunities that set my path towards working with the best neuroimaging modality!
What is your role in the Molecular Connectivity Working Group, and what have you been contributing to or working on within the group?
As co-head of the Molecular Connectivity Working Group, I mainly coordinate activities across our community together with Igor Yakushev. It’s a surprisingly diverse role because coordination also means being ready to roll up my sleeves whenever needed: I try my best to help run things smoothly, whether that’s contributing to scientific papers, organizing scientific and educational events, developing resources for the community, writing grants, or simply connecting people with complementary expertise.
My role has changed quite a bit since the group’s foundation. In its early days, “hands-on” activities were a big part of my work in the group. I’m glad to see how much the group has grown over the years – today, we have a committed team of enthusiastic scientists taking the lead on many of these initiatives.
What scientist or scientific achievement do you most admire?
One scientist I particularly admire is Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute and New York University). I find her approach to doing science especially inspiring. Her adversarial collaboration initiative – where researchers with competing hypotheses work together – captures what I believe science should be: a willingness to challenge our own assumptions, prioritize objective evidence over individual viewpoints, and recognize that scientific progress is driven by collaboration rather than competition.
This is very much the mindset with which Igor and I founded the Molecular Connectivity Working Group. We wanted to create a community where researchers from different backgrounds and perspectives could work collectively to advance the field, while committing to scientific excellence and the highest standards – or, where those standards did not yet exist, to create them ourselves (working on it!).
Dear Colleagues,
We are delighted to announce the call for applications to the doctoral candidate position in Edinburgh for the PREFERENCE project is now open! This is a highly prestigious MSCA doctoral network coordinated by Ronald Boellaard with 15 doctoral candidates distributed across multiple institutions in Europe. The doctoral candidate in Edinburgh will work on development of new methodologies for whole-body network analysis of LAFOV PET datasets, and will be embedded into the PET is Wonderful team in Edinburgh.
Please find out more at the job post and the website: https://preference-consortium.eu/
There are brain focused project positions available: https://preference-consortium.eu/?page_id=269
The deadline for application is the 1st November 2026.
Educational Course: Multimodal Integration in Human Brain Mapping
Bordeaux June 14th, 2026
Organizers: Prof Dr Joana B Pereira and Dr Arianna Sala
You can find the 📚 Course Materials Here!!
Symposium: Molecular Connectivity: Best practices for data analysis
Bordeaux June 19th, 2026
Following the OHBM annual meeting in Bordeaux, we stayed on for the Best Practices Symposium to explore advancements in molecular data processing and analysis. The event sparked excellent discussions and provided valuable insights for everyone who attended.
An open dataset of cerebral tau deposition in young healthy adults based on [18F]MK6240 positron emission tomography
Lam and colleagues present a dataset of 33 young to middle-age healthy adults (mean age 34.0 ± 10.4 years, 12 female) with [18F]MK6240 PET data and T1w magnetic resonance imaging. Longitudinal data are also available in a subset of 9 participants with a minimum follow-up time of 1 year. Our dataset aims to support imaging biomarker studies on younger individuals potentially at risk for AD and to advance work in tauopathies affecting non-geriatric populations generally excluded from neurodegeneration studies.
Read the full publication in Scientific Data.
Just a reminder to the community that MCWG also has a vast list of open dataset available for anyone interested in exploring, building, or conducting research: Imaging Datasets
📝Network-based disease fingerprinting with neuroinflammation PET imaging
This study by Barzon and colleagues aimed at developing a novel data-driven approach to generate single-subject TSPO similarity matrices, applying this framework to a large dataset of 528 PET scans acquired with different radiotracers, across multiple sites and scanners.
Read the full study in Journal of Neuroinflammation.
Key Findings:
📝Dopaminergic nigrostriatal vulnerability in Parkinson’s Disease with diabetes: evidence from severity-matched cohorts
In this study by Galli and colleagues, Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with and without diabetes were scanned with 123I-FP-CIT SPECT to assess the effect of diabetes in the nigrostriatal pathways in two independent cohorts using graph theory analysis.
Read the full study in European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.
Key Findings:
📝Investigating AD and non-AD 18F-Flortaucipir distribution patterns in a memory clinic cohort
Piva and colleagues aimed at differentiating amyloid positive and negative individuals using 18F-Flortaucipir PET using spatial covariance pattern through scaled subprofile modelling using principal component analysis (SSM/PCA) disease patterns (DP).
Read the full study in European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.
Key Findings:
📝Individual-level metabolic connectivity captures cortical morphology and their coupling strengthens in the ageing brain
This study by Facca and colleagues integrated FDG PET and structural MRI data to investigate how cortical morphology constrains large-scale patterns of metabolic connectivity across the human lifespan by demonstrating a global alignment between metabolic connectivity and morphological similarity.
Read the full study in European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.
Key Findings:
📝Age-related changes to brain energetics revealed by PET/MRI imaging
Bevington and colleagues investigated age-related alterations to brain energetics by jointly analysing cerebral glucose metabolism and blood flow data, defining novel metrics that capture regional variability in processes related to relative energy production and relative aerobic glycolysis.
Read the full study in NeuroImage: Clinical.
Key Findings:
The MCWG Outreach Council invites you to submit announcements or information about papers, conferences, presentations or other events or news related to brain and molecular connectivity as well as any positions available or job opportunities that you wish to publicize and share with the community!
Please submit any material for consideration by the final day of each month using this form – thank you!
The MCWG is made up of four international and multidisciplinary councils dedicated to promoting molecular connectivity research via dissemination of methods, results, collaboration, and resource sharing (e.g. datasets, tools) within the scientific community. We encourage the neuroscientific community to take an integrative perspective in study of the brain connectome, where various methods including MRI-based techniques, electrophysiological tools, and molecular imaging advance our understanding of the brain. Please find fundamental questions outlined here: “Brain connectomics: time for a molecular imaging perspective?”
Our website can be found here. We also invite you to join the MCWG!
