Qualifying Exams Paper Compilation

An attempt to develop and apply a white matter categorization schema to the tracts of the brain and then leverage that conceptual framework to propose a hypothetical etiology for schizophrenia.

The motivation for these papers

This paper represents an attempt to impose a rigorous categorical framework to the somewhat unstructured landscape of white matter anatomy. This work would later be reflected in subsequent publications (e.g., Bullock et al. 2022), but the majority of it never made its way into a publication. Part of the underlying motivation for this endeavor was to demonstrate that there was substantial value in rigorously and critically approaching the task of taxonomy and categorical schema formation. It was my contention that the right approach to this task—one which “carved nature at its joints”—would naturally have consequences for our understanding of other natural processes. Chief among these could have been diseases and disorders which might be differentially impacting the subsets of white matter in virtue of the properties that we have chosen to categorize and delineate them. Empirical work may be suggested by various of the hypotheses contained within these papers, however such work was not undertaken as part of the qualifying examination process.

A cautionary note

Readers should be mindful that this collection of papers has not been peer reviewed or subjected to substantial revision. As such there may be both factual and grammatical errors–to say nothing of how scientific understanding of this topic may have changed since 2018. This collection of papers is provided as an example of my writing, an example of how I approach a problem, and as a potentially interesting discussion to consider in and of itself.