CAREER SUMMARY

     I was trained in cognitive neuroscience in Canada by Prof. Melvyn Goodale (Director of the GAP Group in Action & Perception) and Prof. Douglas Munoz (Director of the Sensory-Motor Group at Queen's University).  I was trained in MRI physics by Prof. Terry Peters, (Robarts Research Institute, formerly of the Montreal Neurological Institute).
     The technical achievement of my graduate work was to get talairach multi-map block-designs (Connolly et al. 2000), event-related (Connolly et al. 2002; 2005; 2007) and rapid event-related fMRI (via linear deconvolution, Connolly et al. 2003) working for the Canadian CIHR GAP group. The major thesis of our work was that the frontal cortex is closest to the motor output as compared to the parietal cortex, and that the two lobules - although heavily and reciprocally interconnected - can be functionally dissociated from one another via fMRI.  I have been invited to give lectures on this work in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Germany.
     I then moved to Los Angeles to work at Caltech with Prof. Richard Andersen and to work on a vertical bore 4.7 Tesla monkey fMRI scanner.  Prior to my arrival, we published a well-cited human imaging paper together with Prof. Goodale localizing the area of the brain where the neuro-prosthetic device might be placed, the human 'parietal reach region'.
     I was awarded a CIHR fellowship and moved to New York to work with prefrontal expert Prof. Clayton Curtis.  I recently gave a talk in Atlanta on our new work (a paper to be submitted this month), that provides fMRI evidence for distributed preparatory signals in frontal and parietal cortex (PPC) under the more visual conditions defined by the 'deferred' saccade task (DST); a paradigm that eliminates the memory component and places the emphasis squarely on advance motor preparation (Prog. No. 606.13 SFN Abstracts). The new PPC results revise my doctoral work to include this region as a source of advance preparatory signals (under the more 'visual' or 'naturalistic' conditions of the DST) and are consistent with the monkey fMRI data of Caltech's Igor Kagan et al. (2006 SFN talk Prog. No. 606.7) of the Andersen lab. These data provide support for the use of the PPC as an appropriate site for a cognitive prosthetic implant, given that this region carries metrical, intentional and set-related (inverse SRT correlation) activation. 
     My primary technical objective in the lab has been to get CARET (Computerized Anatomical Restructuring and Editing Toolkit) up and running. CARET is designed for interactively viewing, manipulating, and analyzing surface reconstructions of the cerebral cortex. The next step was to then compute our statistics on the tesselated sphere hyper-inflated surfaces (Joern Diedrichsen, 2005).  This approach has resulted in improved intersubject co-registration of activation maps via aligning consistent fiducial landmarks.     

EDUCATION & TRAINING

B.A. (honours), University of Western Ontario, CANADA, 1997 (supervisor, Prof. Melvyn Goodale)

M.Sc. University of Western Ontario, CANADA, 1999 (supervisor, Prof. Tutis Vilis & Prof. Melvyn Goodale)

Ph.D. University of Western Ontario, CANADA, 2004 (supervisor, Prof. Doug Munoz & Prof. Melvyn Goodale)

Postdoctoral Scholar, California Institute of Technology, USA, 2005 (advisors Prof. Richard Andersen (and Prof. Wolfram Schultz)

Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University, USA, 2005 – pres. (advisor, Prof. Clayton Curtis)

HONORS AND TRAINING AWARDS

1996, University of Western Ontario In-Course Scholarship (1 yr university sponsored award)
1997, Honors B.A. with distinction
1997, Nominee for McClelland Award (best undergrad thesis)
1998, Ontario Graduate Scholarship (1 yr provincial fellowship)
1998, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research PGS A (2 yr national fellowship)
2000, Ontario Graduate Scholarship (1 yr provincial fellowship)
2000, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council PGS B (2 yr national fellowship)
2000, Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Award (3 yr national fellowship)
2003, CIHR BrainStar Award (significant contribution to Canadian medicine by a trainee)
2005, CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship (3 yr national fellowship)

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Connolly, J.D. & Curtis, C.E. (current study). Event-related fMRI of saccades to auditory targets.
Connolly, J.D. & Curtis, C.E. (in prep., peer reviewed talk given at SFN 2006). Pro- and anti-saccade preparation signals in human frontal and parietal cortex. 26 pgs.
Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., Cant, J.S., Munoz, D.P. (2007). Effector specific fields for motor preparation in the human frontal cortex. NeuroImage 34: 1209-19. Download PDF
Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., Goltz, H.C., & Munoz, D.P. (2005). FMRI activation in the human frontal eye field is correlated with saccadic reaction time. Journal of Neurophysiology 94(1), 605-11. Epub 2004 Dec 8. CITATIONS: (~10) Download PDF
Connolly, J.D., Andersen, R.A., & Goodale, M.A. (2003). FMRI evidence for a ‘parietal reach region’ in the human brain. Experimental Brain Research 153(2), 140-5. CITATIONS (~40) Download PDF
Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., Menon, R.S., Munoz, D.P. (2002). Human fMRI evidence for the neural correlates of preparatory set. Nature Neuroscience 5(12): 1345-52. CITATIONS (~70) Download PDF
*comment by R. Marois (2002). The cortical basis of motor planning: does it take two to tango? Nature Neuroscience 5(12), 1254-5. Download PDF
Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., DeSouza, J.F.X., Menon. R.S., Vilis, T. (2000). A comparison of frontoparietal fMRI activation during anti-saccades and anti-pointing. Journal of Neurophysiology, 84: 1645-1655. CITATIONS (~80) Download PDF
Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A. (1999). Vision of the hand in the control of manual prehension. Experimental Brain Research 125: 281-286. CITATIONS: (~40) Download PDF

INVITED TALKS

Connolly, J.D. “The neural correlates of preparatory set”

• California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, Feb 4th, 2003 (invited by Prof. Richard Andersen)
  
• Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Nashville, TN, USA, March 10th, 2003 (invited by Prof. Jeffrey Schall)
  
• Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, March 28th, 2003. (invited by Prof. Douglas Munoz)
  
• Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tubingen, Germany, Invited in March 2003. (invited by Prof. Nikos Logothetis)
  
• New York University, New York, NY, USA, May 20th, 2005. (invited by Prof. David Heeger and Prof. Clayton Curtis)
  
• University College, London, United Kingdom, June 5th, 2005. (invited by Prof. Ray Dolan and Prof. Jon Driver)
  
• McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Invited 2007 (invited by Prof. Sam Mussalam).
  

REFEREED TALKS

Connolly, J.D., Menon, R.S., M.A. Goodale (2001). Areas active during a pointing but not a saccade delay are medial to saccade-and-pointing network. Vision Sciences Society, Journal of Vision 1(3), 265a, http://journalofvision.org/1/3/265/, doi:10.1167/1.3.265.

Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., & Munoz, D.P. (2001). FMRI evidence for the neural correlates of preparatory set in the human. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 27, Program No. 575.7.

Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., Goltz, H.C., & Munoz, D.P. (2002). Neural correlate of motor preparation: pretarget fMRI activation in the human frontal eye field correlated to saccadic reaction time. Program No. 716.10. 2002 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience, CD-ROM.

Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., Goltz, H.C., & Munoz, D.P. (2003). FMRI activation related to preparatory set is correlated with saccade latency in human frontal eye fields but not in the supplementary motor area. Vision Sciences Society, Journal of Vision 3(9), 147a., http://journalofvision.org/3/9/147/, doi:10.1167/3.9.147.

Connolly, J.D., Goodale, M.A., Cant, J.S., & Munoz, D.P. (2004). Preparatory gap and memory-delay fMRI activation in the human frontal eye field is higher for pointing as compared to saccade trials. Vision Sciences Society, Journal of Vision, 4(8), 112a, http://journalofvision.org/4/8/112/, doi:10.1167/4.8.112

Connolly, J.D., Lauer, M.E., Curtis, C.E. (2006). Pro- and anti-saccade preparation signals in human frontal and parietal cortex. Prog. No. 606.13. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, Altanta.

AD-HOC REVIEWER

Nature, Journal of Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Neurophysiology, Neuropsychologia, NeuroImage, Experimental Brain Research

PRESS

Curtis Lab

Caltech Prosthetic Project

CIHR Brain Star Announcement

University of Western Ontario Press Release

Innovations Report