Human brain development is the most protracted of any species, making childhood a critical period during which maturing neural circuits interact with experience to shape the brain. However, much of our understanding of brain development comes from either animal models or postmortem work; how these findings can be extrapolated to the living human brain is not straightforward. In this talk, we will discuss employing advances in quantitative MRI to measure the precise quantity and composition of human neural tissue across development. Expanding on our previous work within visual cortex, we will explore how structure and function develop in two historically overlooked regions in human development: ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum. We find evidence that distinct brain structures undergo distinct forms of structural development, such as pruning versus proliferating tissue, and relate these to measures of brain function within the same participants. Combining these observations with postmortem protein and gene expression analyses, we work towards creating a deeper understanding of human brain development. We find that visually-response prefrontal cortex shows very late-stage emergence for visual category selectivity, and that the cerebellum shows much more heterogeneity in its structure and development than once believed. We complement these findings with some postmortem analyses of brain tissue to quantify the potential proteins and genes scaffolding the development effects we observe with MRI.

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