VUIIS Personnel: Post-Doctoral Fellows

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Post-Doctoral Fellows

Robert Barry

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone: 615-322-0647

Office: MCN AA-3101

Nellie Byun

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: nellie.byun@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-0385

Office: MCN AA-3101

Nellie is investigating the use of pharmacological MRI (phMRI) to map NMDA receptor antagonist-induced brain activity (with a rodent model predictive of schizophrenia) and its reversal by novel compounds with antipsychotic activity. She will be assessing the long-term effects of these compounds in rodents behaviorally and by phMRI. This project is part of a unique collaboration between the laboratory of Jeff Conn, Ph.D., of the Department of Pharmacology, and the VICB Program in Drug Discovery. Not only are the phMRI studies important for pinpointing the neural correlates of psychosis and for testing the efficacy of potential therapeutics for schizophrenia, but comparisons with established typical and atypical antipsychotics will also allow us to determine the functional basis of antipsychotic drugs with different molecular targets and mechanisms.

G. Nicole Davis

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Kennedy Center

E-mail Address: nikki.davis@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-8127

Office: MCN AA-3107

Nikki has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development since receiving dual PhDs from the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Science and the Department of Neuroscience at Colorado University, Boulder, in 2006. The majority of her work is an imaging project directed by Dr. John Gore, investigating the structural and functional correlates of math disabilities in third grade children and the response of these neural correlates to intervention. Nikki also works with Drs. Adam Anderson and Donald Compton on a project investigating the neural correlates of responsiveness to reading intervention in young children.

Barbara Dillenburger

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone: 615-343-2530

Office: MCN AA-3114

Nicole Driggins

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: steffani.n.driggins@Vanderbilt.Edu

Office Phone: 615-322-7149

Office: MCN AA-3101

After earning her B.A. in English from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Nicole Driggins completed post-baccalaureate science courses at Tennessee State University in Nashville and was accepted into their doctorate program in the Department of Biological Sciences, studying the anti-carcinogenic effects of Echinacea purpurea extracts on mammalian cancer cells. Nicole became the first woman to graduate with a PhD in Biology from Tennessee State. After teaching biology at Nashville State Community College, she became a postdoctoral fellow at VUIIS in 2007. She is currently developing the appropriate experimental methods to label rat red blood cells and neural precursor cells with MRI detectable nanoparticles. She is also developing multi-parametric MRI methods to assess the physiological characteristics of tumors grown in window tumor chambers.

Adrienne Dula

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: adrienne.n.dula@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-6175

Office: MCN AA-1101

Adrienne received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt in the spring of 2008. As a postdoctoral fellow in the VUIIS, she will take advantage of the high-field 7 Tesla human scanner's capabilities, specifically in applications for implantation of deep brain stimulators for Parkinson's disease patients. She will work with the image processing core at Vanderbilt to create a high-resolution brain atlas, including the deep brain structures such as the subthalamic nucleus which is affected in diseases such as Parkinson's.

Chris Elder

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: christopher.p.elder@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-343-1845

Office: VUH B-163

Chris's current research project utilizes the post-exercise changes in skeletal muscle T2 to model the spatial and temporal sequence of muscle recruitment in the lower extremity during cycling. The long-term goal is to create optimized electrical stimulation protocols that improve functional electrical cycling performance in individuals with spinal cord injury, thereby enhancing cardiovascular and metabolic adaptations to exercise in this population. Chris began as a postdoctoral fellow at VUIIS in November 2007, working with Bruce Damon in the Muscle Physiology Laboratory. He earned his PhD in Exercise Physiology from the University of Georgia with Kevin McCully and the late Gary Dudley.

Annie Maria Heemskerk

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: a.m.heemskerk@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-343-0465

Office: MCN AA-3101

Anneriet completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, under the direction of Dr. Klaas Nicolay. Her PhD work focused on diffusion tensor imaging of mouse skeletal muscle. In June 2006, she joined the VUIIS and is primarily working with Dr. Bruce Damon. Her research projects consist of DTI-based fiber tracking in human muscle and quantitative tissue characterization using diffusion MRI.

Marcin Jankiewicz

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: m.jankiewicz@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-343-2530

Office: MCN AA-3114

Marcin is involved in projects related to B1 inhomogeneities at ultra high-field MRI. As part of his research, he designs spoke RF-pulses based to correct for RF / B1 inhomogeneities at 7 Tesla.

Chunming Li

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: chunming.li@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-343-7083

Office: MCN AA-1109

Chunming Li's research interests include brain morphometry, image segmentation, MR image bias correction, shape analysis, image de-noising, and applications of computer vision and mathematical methods in medical imaging. His current projects involve VBM analysis for math disabilities and structural MRI analysis for fetal alcohol syndrome.

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Ke Li

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone: 615-322-0294

Office: VUH B-165

Xia "Lisa" Li

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: xia.li.1@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-7915

Office: MCN AA-1109

Lisa Li received her M.S. degree in December 2003 and her PhD in Electrical Engineering in December 2007, under the direction of Benoit Dawant. She is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow in the VUIIS. Her primary research interest involves medical image processing and analysis, especially medical image registration, image segmentation, and pattern recognition.

Arabinda Mishra

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: arabinda.mishra@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-6213

Office: MCN AA-1109

Dr. Mishra earned his MTech and PhD in Instrumentation and Biomedical Image Processing from IIT Kharagpur, India. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii and as an Assistant Professor in IGIT Sarang, India, before coming to Vanderbilt in October 2004. He is currently working on an image-guided diagnosis of atherosclerosis, a coronary geometry study focusing on non-rigid motion analysis of coronary arteries using biplane cine-angiograms and intravascular ultrasound to characterize the shape and motion patterns in order to estimate the degree of sclerosis causing occlusion in blood flow to the cardiac wall. He is also working on an integrated fMRI / DTI study to develop reliable methods for characterizing the structure/function relationship in the human language system. His work focuses on quantitative analysis of the structural connections between functionally active regions in the language circuit of the brain and its relationship with steady state inter-regional correlation between concerned regions.

Don Nolting

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: don.nolting@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-8503

Office: MCN AA-3101

Don received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Iowa in May 2005. He started at Vanderbilt in October 2005 as a Cancer Imaging Research Fellow with Dr. Ron Price. Soon after arriving, he was brought into the Imaging Institute to work with Drs. Pham, Yankeelov, and Manning. Don's graduate work focused on the synthesis of lanthanide and early transition metal cluster complexes. He is interested in the synthesis of multi-modal molecular contrast agents for optical, PET/SPECT/CT, and/or MR imaging. Since joining VUIIS, Don has been working on the synthesis of macromolecular organic molecules for imaging pH via optical and MR imaging. He has also been involved in the synthesis of small organic molecules for the imaging of COX-2.

Indrajit Saha

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone: 615-343-0897

Office: VUH B-163

Otto Sanchez

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: otto.sanchez@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-343-5856

Office: VUH B-163

Otto's primary research interest is the effects of diabetes on muscle function. The two are intimately related because muscle tissue is the main site of glucose uptake in the body. His main project at the Institute is to validate a methodology to determine oxygen consumption in skeletal muscles non-invasively using MRI technology. In the exercise lab, he is also investigating the causes of muscle fatigue. He received his MD degree in Venezuela from the Universidad de Oriente in 1989 and his PhD degree from the University of Minnesota in 2004 and has been working at Vanderbilt since January 2004.

Sepideh Shokouhi

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:sepideh.shokouhi@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-6214

Office: MCN AA-3101

Sepi's research interest is developing new nuclear imaging modalities (PET, SPECT) and statistical parameter estimations for task-specific applications.

Mohammed Noor Tantawy

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone: 615-343-4795

Office: MCN AA-2105

Tricia Thornton-Wells

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Kennedy Center

E-mail Address: t.thornton-wells@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-7146

Office: 207 MRL/Kennedy Center

Tricia Thornton-Wells has done work in bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics, and genetic epidemiology, with a focus on computational methodologies for detecting heterogeneity and gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. Her current postdoctoral training involves designing and analyzing neuroimaging studies of neurodevelopmental disorders. Tricia is investigating genotype-phenotype relationships in neurological disorders, particularly cognitive and affective disorders, including neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. By identifying neural correlates and genetic risk factors behind particular sub- or endo-phenotypes, we can increase our knowledge of normal and abnormal processes and perhaps identify targets for therapeutic (behavioral, pharmacological, and/or genetic) treatments.

Theodore Towse

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone:

Office: VUH B-163

Jack Virostko

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: jack.virostko@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-0647

Office: MCN AA-3101

Jack began as a postdoctoral fellow with VUIIS in January 2007. Prior to that he received a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt. His graduate work focused on imaging the pancreatic islet, with emphasis on bioluminescence imaging. Jack's research interests are multi-modal molecular imaging using optical and MRI techniques. He is developing cell labeling techniques and targeted contrast agents for in vivo application.

Amanda Wake

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address:

Office Phone:

Office:

Shelby Wyatt

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: shelby.wyatt@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-322-6731

Office: MCN AA-3101

Shelby received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering under the direction of Drs. Darryl Bornhop and Todd Giorgio at Vanderbilt University. Her PhD research focused on the quantitative characterization of cancer-targeted near-infrared molecular imaging agents for enhanced disease detection. Since joining VUIIS as a postdoctoral research fellow in April of 2007, Shelby has pursued the synthesis of multi-modal imaging data to provide a clearer understanding of tumor biology and enable better prediction of cancer treatment response. The long-term goal of her research is to develop, implement, and evaluate quantitative, non-invasive, multi-modal imaging techniques for assessing the response to treatment of patients with breast cancer.

Jingping Xie

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

E-mail Address: jingping.xie@vanderbilt.edu

Office Phone: 615-936-7083

Office: MCN AA-3114

J.P.'s current research project is to develop specific high-affinity molecules (mainly DNA aptamers) targeted to phenotypic difference between two biological entities with known physiologic significance. Major focus is placed on selecting binding molecules which can recognize and access various specific tumor cells and their subsequent applications in molecular cancer imaging.

Last Modified: June 30, 2008. Webmaster