Keith Bush, Ph.D. | Associate Professor

Dr. Keith Bush received his degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and his doctoral degree in Computer Science from Colorado State University. His doctoral research explored mathematical structures for implementing adaptive control systems, e.g., reinforcement learning, to real-world nonlinear dynamical systems. In 2008 he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Joelle Pineau of McGill University where he applied real-time adaptive control systems to suppress epileptiform activity in animal models of epilepsy. This work was done in collaboration with neurophysiologists at the Montreal Neurological Institute. In 2010 he joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and established a machine learning collaboration with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) to analyze multimodal neuroimaging and behavioral data sets. In 2015, Dr. Bush joined the Dept. of Psychiatry at UAMS as an assistant professor in the Brain Imaging Research Center (BIRC). He has focused his research interests on machine learning and control theoretic approaches to real-time human neuroimaging, using both real-time fMRI and fMRI-based neurofeedback to understand and exploit volitional regulation of emotion. By understanding how the human brain decodes and integrates neurofeedback signals into its processing, Dr. Bush hopes to optimize neuroimaging studies and develop new control theoretic treatments for emotional disorders.