An incredible woman in science and inspiration to many, Dr. Dani Bassett is someone everyone should be watching! Dr. Dani Bassett, NIH OxCam Class of 2009, received her PhD in Physics under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Duke, Dr. Ed Bullmore, and Dr. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg. Then, she went on to become a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of California Santa Barbara and also, a Sage Junior Research Fellow, before become a faculty member at The University of Pennsylvania.
The Bassett Lab focuses on isolating problems at the intersection of basic science, engineering, and clinical medicine that can be tackled using systems-level approaches. They seek to develop new mathematical methods with the goal of predicting system behavior and designing perturbations to affect a specific outcome. The Bassett lab also develops analytic tools to probe the “hard-wired pathways and transient communication patterns inside of the brain in an effort to identify organizational principles, to develop novel diagnostics of disease, and to design personalized therapeutics for rehabilitation and treatment of brain injury, neurological disease, and psychiatric disorders.”
In 2014, she was the youngest individual to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. Not to mention, in 2016, she was named one of the ten most brilliant scientists of the year by Popular Science magazine. Dr. Bassett is an Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania mentoring more than 20 members and has seen even more go on to become students and professors at prestigious institutions. She was recently named the 2018 recipient of the Erdős-Rényi Prize in Network Science by the Network Science Society (NetSci) for her “fundamental contributions to our understanding of the network architecture of the human brain, its evolution over learning and development, and its alteration in neurological disease.”