Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I hold a bachelor’s in “Biomedical engineering”, a master’s in “Biomedical imaging”, and a Ph.D. in “Clinical Neurosciences”. I received my PhD in Clinical Neurosciences from University of Turku, Turku, Finland in June 2021. My doctoral dissertation is entitled “Microstructural analysis of diffuse axonal injury after traumatic brain injury using diffusion-weighted Magnetic resonance imaging”. Diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) has been shown to be a sensitive tool to detect subtle microstructural changes in the brain. My doctoral work showed that not only can these subtle changes associated with diffuse axonal injury after traumatic brain injury (TBI) be detected a few weeks after the injury using dMRI, but also, these abnormalities evolve over time and would even disrupt brain’s structural network. Besides my doctoral research, I was involved in other studies, one of which was to investigate the role of neuroinflammation following traumatic brain injury using TSPO PET imaging where we found increased microglial activation in patients with TBI compared with healthy controls.
I joined the renowned Loggia Lab as of January 2023 to improve my knowledge in neuroimaging and to learn more about the biophysical and molecular aspects of neuroinflammation as it is common among several diseases and disorders including chronic pain. Most of the patients with chronic pain suffer daily and their conditions do not tend to change drastically by conventional drugs. By combining non-invasive PET/MR imaging, behavioral and neurocognitive tests, and other clinical attributes, we believe it would be possible to find therapeutic targets to reduce neuroinflammation or inhibit the neuroinflammatory response which, later would pave the way to finding promising treatments to alleviate patients’ debilitations.