What's new in the lab

Members of the lab traveled to New York in early August for an international conference, where graduate student Ahhyun Lee presented a poster.

Polygenic risk-informed white matter integrity improves deep learning-based prediction of youth depression, led by first author Jungyoun Janice Min (MS, Brain & Cognitive Sciences) with lab members and collaborators, was published in Communications Medicine. Adding polygenic risk information to diffusion-MRI measures of white matter integrity improved deep-learning prediction of depression in adolescents.

The lab has been selected for the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Mid-Career Researcher Program, a competitive individual research grant that provides a stable foundation for developing the lab’s research program. Announcing the news, PI Jiook Cha thanked the members — none of this would have been possible without them.

Decoding Dynamic Visual Experience from Calcium Imaging via Cell-Pattern-Aware Pretraining, a paper by PhD student Sangyoon Bae, has been accepted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), to be presented in Rio de Janeiro. The work decodes dynamic visual experience from calcium-imaging recordings using cell-pattern-aware pretraining.

Jubin Choi was selected for a Spotlight Presentation at the 2025 NeurIPS Workshop on Foundation Models for the Brain and Body for the pioneering work “NeuroMamba: A State-Space Foundation Model for Functional MRI”. This model addresses linear-time temporal context scaling on 4D neuroimaging datasets.

Jungwoo Seo received the prestigious Silver Award at the BK Future Innovation Talent Awards in recognition of his cutting-edge research on physics-informed generative modeling and virtual brain simulations.

Moon Seokjin, Wang Heehwan, and Oh Kyungjin presented an interactive brain-art installation and live EEG affective decoding demonstration at the OB/Scene Focus exhibition, showcasing real-time neural memory synthesis to the public.

“Polygenic architecture of brain structure and function, behaviors, and psychopathologies in children” — led by Yoonjung Yoonie Joo with lab members Bo-Gyeom Kim, Gakyung Kim, Eunji Lee, Jungwoo Seo, and Prof. Jiook Cha — was published in Nature Communications, mapping genome-wide polygenic influences on the developing brain in the ABCD cohort.

Eunji Lee and Bo-Gyeom Kim’s study titled “Polygenic scores for psychiatric traits mediate the impact of multigenerational history of depression on offspring psychopathology” was officially published in Molecular Psychiatry.

Dongyeop Han, Ahhyun Lee, Taeyang Lee, and Sebin Lee’s pioneering work “DIVER-0: A Fully Channel Equivariant EEG Foundation Model” was accepted for a Spotlight presentation at the ICML 2025 Workshop on Generative Biology & Healthcare.