Schizophrenia: A temporal disorder?
11/3/22, 10:50 AM - 11/3/22, 11:20 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) (30 minutes)

Dr. Annemarie Wolff
Postdoctoral Research Fellow University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research; Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Group
Postdoctoral Research Fellow University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research; Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Group

After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, Wolff continued her education at the University

of Regensburg (Germany), studying for a master’s degree in experimental and clinical neuroscience. She completed her thesis work

at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland on postsynaptic protein characterization (PSD-95) in schizophrenia. After its completion,

she began her PhD in Neuroscience in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa (Canada). Changing directions, her work

there centered on interindividual variability of complex cognitive tasks in healthy human electrophysiology (EEG). Employing methods

of time-frequency analysis, neural dynamics and complexity, Wolff’s resulting work was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal

for academic excellence. Currently, she is finishing her postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Mental Health Research

(Ottawa) where her work focuses on neural variability and dynamics in psychiatric disorders.


Currently, one quarter of all medical disorders are mental health disorders. Until now, medical science has lacked sufficient

understanding about the physical brain mechanisms and how they relate to the mind. And, more specifically, how the physical brain

mechanisms relate to the symptoms of disorders of the mind. If scientific brain biomarkers could be identified, they could be used for

a more precise diagnosis of mental disorders and more effective, individualized treatments. Using schizophrenia (SCZ) as an example,

recent EEG-derived research findings from NMHD scientists have identified biomarkers that relate to the clinical features of this disorder.

Linking the dynamics of spatial and temporal patterns in the brain, as measured using EEG, with symptom severity of SCZ - measured

with the PANSS subscales - the resulting stepwise linear regression models could be used to monitor treatment progress and/or

assess treatment efficacy. In sum, as shown in the case of SCZ, NMHD has used EEG research on neural dynamics to link the clinical

symptoms of this disorder to brain-based neural markers which could be used to evaluate treatment response or efficacy in individual

patients.