Katherine Bottenhorn, PhD

2023 BRAIN K99/R00 Awardee
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Dr. Katherine Bottenhorn, 2023 BRAIN K99/R00 Awardee
University of Southern California
Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Katherine Bottenhorn is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. She completed her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and psychology at Auburn University and her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Florida International University, where she studied individual differences in functional brain network organization. Katherine is broadly interested in factors contributing to variation in brain structure and function, both within and between individuals, and how they can help explain the diversity of neurodevelopmental trajectories, especially during puberty. By leveraging predictive modeling and multi-omics approaches, her current work explores the influences of pubertal and environmental influences on early adolescent brain changes. In her NIH BRAIN Initiative project, she will extend this work to assess hormone-related brain structure and functional connectivity during early adolescence, the roles of sex hormones in microstructure-function coupling across the brain, and the temporal stability of identified neuroendocrine phenomena throughout puberty. In doing so, this work develops generalizable models of endocrine-mediated pubertal brain development and pre-trained models of brain-hormone associations that can be applied to boost predictive power of smaller neuroendocrine datasets. Ultimately, the goal of her project is to generate new knowledge regarding contributions of hormone-based brain plasticity during puberty to structure-function coupling and brain phenotypes of risk and resilience for psychopathology.