Wesley, Michael J

Research Activities/Projects

Drs. Michael Wesley and Joshua Lile are currently researching various substance use disorders in human populations. Dr. Wesley specializes in complex neuroimaging analytical techniques including statistical parametric mapping (SPM) mass univariate analyses as well as multivariate/multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). Dr. Wesley also utilizes reinforcement learning frameworks to computationally model human behavior in dynamic choice settings. Dr. Joshua Lile has extensive experience in human behavioral pharmacology with an emphasis on the neurobehavioral basis of substance use disorders and the development of interventions using translational methods and technologies. Together, they aim to use UK Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) resources to enhance their ability to conduct computationally intensive analyses.

Computational Methods

Drs. Wesley and Lile are currently collaborating on multiple projects that would be assisted by the resources that the CCS One of the analytical methods of interest is Elastic Net Logistic Regression (ENLR). ENLR is a MVPA neuroimaging technique which requires extensive computational resources that the CCS provides. Drs. Wesley and Lile also aim to run simulations of human behavior in dynamic choice settings. Simulations will be conducted to better understand the relationships between free parameters in the reinforcement learning models as well as to validate the efficacy of task designs and analytic approaches. Parallelization of internal code will facilitate more complex analyses.

Personnel

Michael Wesley, Ph.D. – Principal Investigator, UK College of Medicine

Joshua Lile, Ph.D. – Principal Investigator, UK College of Medicine

Students

Preston Tolbert, B.A. – Graduate Student, UK School of Arts and Sciences

Miranda Ramirez, B.A. – Graduate Student, UK College of Public Health

Software

MVPA neuroimaging analyses will be conducted via MATLAB and R scripts which are all written internally. Simulations of behavioral data will be run exclusively in MATLAB from internally written scripts. Members of Drs. Wesley’s and Lile’s labs will also be incorporating Python scripts into their analysis pipelines in the coming years.

Projects