Judith Ford, PhD

Co-Director, Brain Imaging and EEG Lab
Professor
Department of Psychiatry
+1 415 221-4810 ext. 24187
Research Overview: 

Dr. Ford’s work is focused on psychosis, specifically auditory verbal hallucinations, a cardinal symptom of schizophrenia associated with high morbidity and mortality. She uses neurophysiological methods to test the hypothesis that auditory hallucinations result from misperceptions of sensations that originate within the ‘self’ that are due to a basic inability topredict these self-generated sensations.  If predictive mechanisms are dysfunctional, sensations that should have been predicted, but were not, may be attributed to external sources and thoughts may become audible.  These errors of prediction are costly to society and the patient.

Dr. Ford tests this hypothesis by recording neural responses to self-generated sounds from auditory cortex.  The role of primary sensory cortex is to encode and transmit sensory “prediction errors” and only process stimuli that deviate from the brain’s representations of expected stimuli.  The predictability of sensory events derives from the fact that sensory events are a predictable consequence of one’s own actions or thoughts.  This prediction is instantiated via efference copy/corollary discharge forward model systems, studied and described across the animal kingdom.

While Dr. Ford’s earlier work focused on the neurophysiological reflections of these mechanisms during vocalizations, she is now adding paradigms and methods that are more easily translatable to animal models of schizophrenia.  She has been collecting EEG and fMRI data while psychiatric patients are pushing a button to deliver a visual or auditory stimulus to themselves.  In this way, she is can identify specific elements of circuits involved in predictive coding and relate these to psychotic experiences, while using methods that bench neuroscientists can test on their animal models of psychosis.

Dr. Ford earned her BA in Psychology.  Although she earned her PhD in neuroscience from Stanford, her dissertation was guided remotely by Steven A. Hillyard, at UC San Diego. Dr. Ford completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship through UCSF before returning again to Stanford to become a research associate in psychiatry. She remained at Stanford, joining the faculty first as an associate professor and then as a full professor. In 2004 Dr. Ford joined the psychiatry faculty of Yale University. In 2007, Dr. Ford moved her research laboratory to UCSF, where she co-directs the Brain Imaging and EEG Laboratory with Dr. Daniel Mathalon.

She currently directs the VA Schizophrenia Research Fellowship Program.

Primary Thematic Area: 
Neurobiology
Secondary Thematic Area: 
None
Research Summary: 
Human neuroscience focused on serious mental illness such as schizophrenia
Publications: 

Chromatic fusion: generative multimodal neuroimaging data fusion provides multi-informed insights into schizophrenia.

medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences

Geenjaar EPT, Lewis NL, Fedorov A, Wu L, Ford JM, Preda A, Plis SM, Calhoun VD

The Scanner as the Stimulus: Deficient Gamma-BOLD Coupling in Schizophrenia at Rest.

Schizophrenia bulletin

Jacob MS, Sargent K, Roach BJ, Shamshiri EA, Mathalon DH, Ford JM

Large-scale analysis of structural brain asymmetries in schizophrenia via the ENIGMA consortium.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Schijven D, Postema MC, Fukunaga M, Matsumoto J, Miura K, de Zwarte SMC, van Haren NEM, Cahn W, Hulshoff Pol HE, Kahn RS, Ayesa-Arriola R, Ortiz-Garc?a de la Foz V, Tordesillas-Gutierrez D, V?zquez-Bourgon J, Crespo-Facorro B, Aln?s D, Dahl A, Westlye LT, Agartz I, Andreassen OA, J?nsson EG, Kochunov P, Bruggemann JM, Catts SV, Michie PT, Mowry BJ, Quid? Y, Rasser PE, Schall U, Scott RJ, Carr VJ, Green MJ, Henskens FA, Loughland CM, Pantelis C, Weickert CS, Weickert TW, de Haan L, Brosch K, Pfarr JK, Ringwald KG, Stein F, Jansen A, Kircher TTJ, Nenadic I, Kr?mer B, Gruber O, Satterthwaite TD, Bustillo J, Mathalon DH, Preda A, Calhoun VD, Ford JM, Potkin SG, Chen J, Tan Y, Wang Z, Xiang H, Fan F, Bernardoni F, Ehrlich S, Fuentes-Claramonte P, Garcia-Leon MA, Guerrero-Pedraza A, Salvador R, Sarr? S, Pomarol-Clotet E, Ciullo V, Piras F, Vecchio D, Banaj N, Spalletta G, Michielse S, van Amelsvoort T, Dickie EW, Voineskos AN, Sim K, Ciufolini S, Dazzan P, Murray RM, Kim WS, Chung YC, Andreou C, Schmidt A, Borgwardt S, McIntosh AM, Whalley HC, Lawrie SM, du Plessis S, Luckhoff HK, Scheffler F, Emsley R, Grotegerd D, Lencer R, Dannlowski U, Edmond JT, Rootes-Murdy K, Stephen JM, Mayer AR, Antonucci LA, Fazio L, Pergola G, Bertolino A, D?az-Caneja CM, Janssen J, Lois NG, Arango C, Tomyshev AS, Lebedeva I, Cervenka S, Sellgren CM, Georgiadis F, Kirschner M, Kaiser S, Hajek T, Skoch A, Spaniel F, Kim M, Kwak YB, Oh S, Kwon JS, James A, Bakker G, Kn?chel C, St?blein M, Oertel V, Uhlmann A, Howells FM, Stein DJ, Temmingh HS, Diaz-Zuluaga AM, Pineda-Zapata JA, L?pez-Jaramillo C, Homan S, Ji E, Surbeck W, Homan P, Fisher SE, Franke B, Glahn DC, Gur RC, Hashimoto R, Jahanshad N, Luders E, Medland SE, Thompson PM, Turner JA, van Erp TGM, Francks C

Rich-club connectivity and structural connectome organization in youth at clinical high-risk for psychosis and individuals with early illness schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia research

Hua JPY, Cummings J, Roach BJ, Fryer SL, Loewy RL, Stuart BK, Ford JM, Vinogradov S, Mathalon DH

Mismatch Negativity and Theta Oscillations Evoked by Auditory Deviance in Early Schizophrenia.

Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging

Hua JPY, Roach BJ, Ford JM, Mathalon DH