Dr. Angela Laird is a Distinguished University Professor of
Physics at FIU. Her research uses functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) to study functional connectivity
and co-activation, with particular emphasis on developing
meta-analysis methods and neuroinformatics tools and
software. Her work has involved aggregation of diverse
data sources and types, harmonization across datasets,
building cognitive ontologies, and conducting complex,
large-scale data analyses. Beyond this neuroinformatics
work, Dr. Laird has served as a site PI for the Adolescent
Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study at FIU since
the inception of that study in 2016. She is also also the PI
of the ABCD-ReproNim Course, an R25 research
educational program to teach responsible and
reproducible analyses of ABCD study data. Dr. Laird
serves on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse
(NACDA) and represents NIDA on the BRAIN Initiative
Multi-Council Working Group.

Dr Laird will first review the core objectives of neuroimaging research, clarifying what these methods can
(and cannot) tell us about the brain. She will then address the critical challenges of reproducibility,
including how analytical flexibility contributes to the high variability seen across the scientific literature.
While the field has made significant strides through community guidelines and standardized software, the
challenge of synthesizing these diverse findings remains. She will discuss the role of meta-analysis as a
vital tool for comparing results across studies and demonstrate how individual researchers can enhance
the rigor of their own work by integrating changes into their existing analytic workflows.