Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Carleton University Scientist, University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research at The Royal
Dr. Berman did his graduate training at McGill University in Montreal, where he obtained his Master's in Medical Radiation Physics and PhD in Biomedical Engineering under Prof. Bruce Pike's supervision. Following that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, working at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Massachusetts General Hospital) under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Polimeni. During his training, Dr. Berman was a recipient of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada Graduate Scholarship (Master's), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Canada Graduate Scholarship (Doctoral), and the CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship (ranked in the top 10 out of >600 applicants).
Dr. Berman joined the faculty at Carleton University and the IMHR in 2022. His research focuses on the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, for mapping brain activity and physiology. He has developed fMRI techniques to map brain activity at unprecedented high spatial resolution and has made several key contributions to imaging brain physiology with improved accuracy.
Dr. Berman currently holds funding from NSERC and CFI. He has given numerous invited research and educational talks, including a three-part Masterclass on the Basics of Advanced Brain Imaging at the 2023 Joint Annual Meeting of the International Society of MRI Radiographers and Technologists and the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Trainees
Yasaman Shafaee (PhD)
Yasaman earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in Physics at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Yasaman's PhD thesis aims to make measurements of oxygen metabolism (i.e., CMRO2) using calibrated fMRI more reliable during transient periods of brain activity, such as shortly after a stimulus is turned on/off or in the resting state.
Eva Anderson (MSc)
Eva did her BSc at Carleton, majoring in Physics with minors in Math and Neuroscience. Eva's master's thesis examines the role of vascular and non-vascular tissue magnetic susceptibility in quantitative imaging techniques, like calibrated fMRI and quantitative BOLD.
Zichael Labomarel (MSc)
Zichael did his BSc in Physics at Carleton. For his honours project, Zichael worked on an MR Spectroscopy project with Dr. Reggie Taylor at the Royal. Zichael's master's thesis is focused on comparing different brain metabolism quantification techniques.
Haydn Fleury (BSc)
Haydn is completing his Honours in Physics at Carleton. He is doing his Honours Thesis in our lab, performing modelling of the BOLD signal to quantify the role imaging voxel size has on the vessel-size sensitivity of the BOLD signal.
Past Members
Jerelle O'Brien (summer student)
Jerelle is doing her BSc in Physics at Carleton. She was awarded an inaugural Black and Indigenous Summer Research Internship (BISRI) award from the Faculty of Science to implement a new technique for modelling the MRI signal from blood in our software toolkit, BOLDswimsuite.
Yuhan Ma (Postdoc)
Dr. Ma developed a novel technique based on Time-of-Flight MRI to quantify blood flow and volume of individual small blood vessels of the brain. She was awarded a prestigious NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project and was one of the top-ranking applicants in the Physics section.
Imola MacPhee (Methodology Rotation PhD student)
Imola did a Methodology Rotation in our lab. She is doing her PhD in Cognitive Science with Dr. John Anderson, examining cognitive changes associated with hearing loss during aging and using neuroimaging to understand the physiological basis for these changes. In her rotation, she helped set up a protocol using Arterial Spin Labelling (ASL) for measuring stimulus-induced changes in cerebral blood flow.
Jacob Horne (summer student, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering)
Jacob designed and developed an MRI-compatible, 3D-printed phantom for experimentally validating velocity measurements in small tubing, simulating what we measure in small blood vessels in the brain.
