Rate My Professor Jason Lerch

Jason Lerch is Professor of Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, serving as Director of Preclinical Imaging at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN). He retains affiliations as an adjunct scientist at the Mouse Imaging Centre of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and as Associate Professor in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. Lerch earned a B.A. in anthropology and social studies of medicine from McGill University in 1999 and a Ph.D. in neurology and neurosurgery from the same institution in 2005, focusing on in vivo measurements of cortical thickness using MRI under the supervision of Alan Evans. Following his doctorate, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mouse Imaging Centre from 2005 to 2008 with Mark Henkelman and John Sled, and spent 14 years there as a senior scientist before joining Oxford in 2019.

Lerch's research centers on neuroimaging in rodents, particularly neurodevelopment and genetics, to parse autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions, understand how sex and gender shape the brain leading to disparities in mental health, and elucidate the mechanisms of MRI-detectable brain plasticity. His lab improves MRI acquisition, processing, and analysis methods by integrating mechanistic experiments in mouse models with human studies. Key publications include 'Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is characterized by a delay in cortical maturation' (Shaw et al., 2007, PNAS), 'Neurodevelopmental trajectories of the human cerebral cortex' (Shaw et al., 2008, Journal of Neuroscience), 'Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents' (Shaw et al., 2006, Nature), 'Studying neuroanatomy using MRI' (Lerch et al., 2017, Nature Neuroscience), 'Clustering autism: using neuroanatomical differences in 26 mouse models to gain insight into the heterogeneity' (Ellegood et al., 2015, Molecular Psychiatry), and 'Whole-brain comparison of rodent and human brains using spatial transcriptomics' (Beauchamp et al., 2022, eLife). His highly cited works have significantly influenced the fields of neuroanatomy, developmental neuroscience, and neuroimaging methods for studying brain changes in health and disease.