Abraham Killanin Receives F30 Fellowship Award

Puberty is a period marked by the emergence of enhanced cognitive functioning, but also an increased incidence of mental illness. Some research has suggested that the drastic changes in sex hormones that occurs during the pubertal transition, namely dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), testosterone, and estradiol exert sex and region-specific effects on neural structure that affects cognitive and affective development, but research to date has been largely restricted to animals, with only a handful of human neuroimaging studies in this area. In September of 2022, MD/PhD graduate student, Abraham Killanin, a promising physician-scientist, was awarded an F30 NIH fellowship to use advanced dynamic functional brain mapping method to identify the impact of developmental changes in DHEA, testosterone, and estradiol on brain and higher-order cognitive function in typically-developing children and adolescents. Mr. Killanin is a graduate student in Dr. Tony Wilson’s DICoN Laboratory at the Institute for Human Neuroscience at Boys Town National Research Hospital and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

To learn more about Mr. Killanin’s project, please visit NIH Reporter.