Lab Members

I am a behavioral neuroscientist who uses magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain as it relates to behavior. My research interest is in affective dysfunction across a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric populations.

I obtained my PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia which examined neuroanatomical correlates of emotional, social and personality changes following neurosurgery to the prefrontal cortex.

My role in the ABC lab is to identify neuroimaging biomarkers of cardiovascular risk and functional decline in adults at midlife at risk for cardiovascular disease as part of the longitudinal CARDIA study.

I am a NARSAD Young Investigator Award recipient, for which I am collecting multimodal MRI data with a Human Connectome Project protocol to predict relapse in individuals with major depressive and bipolar disorder. I am also involved in a project studying the impact of perinatal exposure to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and antiretroviral therapy on structural brain changes in adolescents who did not acquire HIV.

I have published studies using a lesion-deficit analysis, task-based functional MRI (fMRI), resting state functional connectivity, subcortical morphology and a transdiagnostic meta-analysis of white matter changes in emotional disorders.

My research expertise spans clinical epidemiology, population based science and neuropathology. Specifically, my work focuses on investigating the role of vascular pathologies in development and progression of brain aging; and the complexities of the heart-brain connection across human aging.

I obtained my PhD from Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands, which focused on exploring the role of subclinical cardiac biomarkers in development of cognitive impairment and functional decline in older adults.

The findings of my research have been published in high impact international journals such as Circulation, Neurology and Stroke. See the full list of my publications.

As a postdoctoral fellow in ABC Lab, I am expanding my line of research to a broader spectrum of aging, including young and middle-age adults, to explore early markers of cerebrovascular damage and their relation to clinical and brain MRI outcomes as part of the CARDIA study.

I also collaborate with the department of Radiology to examine the role of midlife cerebrovascular hemodynamics through application of novel MR techniques such as 4D flow MRI.