UCI professor receives NIH grant to develop model to explain child neurobehavioral disorders

Michael Lee, UCI professor of cognitive sciences, has been awarded a five-year, $81,956 grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop mathematical models of brain activity to help understand behaviors in children diagnosed with ADHD and other neurobehavioral disorders. His work is part of a larger study being conducted by Vinod Menon, the director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. Lee’s models will analyze behavioral data captured in the NIH Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study, the nation’s largest long-term study of brain development and child health. “The goal is to help explain the underlying factors that drive the dysfunctional behavior dynamics that characterize psychopathologies,” Lee says. “This means developing models that explain response inhibition, cognitive control, memory and the ability to tune out distractions.”