Associate Professor, Department of Physics, Carleton University Scientist, University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research at The Royal
I did my Master's in Medical Radiation Physics and PhD in Biomedical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Bruce Pike at McGill University in Montreal. Following that, I 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 my training, I 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).
I joined the faculty at Carleton University and the IMHR in 2022. My research focuses on the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, for mapping brain activity and physiology. I have developed fMRI techniques to map brain activity at unprecedented high spatial resolution and have made several key contributions to imaging brain physiology with improved accuracy.
I currently hold funding from NSERC, CFI, and other sources. I have given numerous invited research and educational talks, including for my main scientific society, the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. I am an early-career researcher member in the Vascular Training (VAST) Platform, a Canada-wide program offering training opportunities and funding to research labs with interests in vascular cognitive impairment.
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.
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 focuses on implementing a technique to estimate the oxygen extraction fraction and oxygen metabolism across the brain by combining the MR signal relaxation and phase.
David García Gómez (BSc)
David is an undergraduate physics student at the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia and joined our lab for the summer as a Mitacs Global Research Intern. He is developing simulations to study the impact of MRI voxel size on large vein contamination in BOLD fMRI. David is continuing this work as part of his undergraduate thesis.
Past Members
Jerelle O'Brien (BSc)
Jerelle completed her Honours thesis in the lab and worked two summers in the lab. She was awarded an inaugural Black and Indigenous Summer Research Internship (BISRI) award from the Faculty of Science. Honours thesis: Using the MRI Transverse Relaxation Rate of Blood to Investigate the Magnetic Susceptibility of Haemoglobin
Haydn Flemming (BSc)
Congratulations, Haydn, on being awarded the Fourth-Year Project Prize! Honours thesis: Understanding the Role of Voxel Size on Large Vein Contamination in BOLD Functional MRI
Eva Anderson (MSc)
Eva developed and applied an approach to determine the blood oxygenation at which the magnetic susceptibility of blood matches that of the surrounding tissue throughout the brain. MSc thesis: Separating the vascular and nonvascular sources of magnetic susceptibility in physiological MRI techniques based on the reversible transverse relaxation rate, R2’
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.
