Research Summary
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF focused on developing MRI methods that provide novel information about tissue structure and function that are not accessible by other clinical imaging modalities. My background is primarily in MR pulse sequence development, including MR physics, RF pulse design, acquisition strategies, and reconstruction techniques, beginning in 2003 under the advising of Profs. Dwight Nishimura and John Pauly at Stanford University. I came to UCSF as a post-doc in 2007 under Prof. Daniel Vigneron and joined the faculty in 2011.
A major focus of my research program is hyperpolarized carbon-13 metabolic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods, and I am part of the team at UCSF translating this modality into human studies of cancer. The technology has the potential to improve staging of cancer and monitoring treatment response by measuring real-time conversion in key metabolic pathways. I develop the MRI data acquisition and image reconstruction methodologies for these studies.
Research Funding
July 1, 2018 - June 30, 2022 - Imaging Metabolism and Cellular Transport in Cancer, Principal Investigator. Sponsor: American Cancer Society, Sponsor Award ID: 131715-RSG-18-005-01-CCE
April 15, 2018 - March 31, 2022 - MRI methods for high resolution imaging of the lung, Principal Investigator. Sponsor: NIH/NHLBI, Sponsor Award ID: R01HL136965
September 17, 2014 - May 31, 2018 - Hyperpolarized C-13 Diffusion MRI Measures of Cellular Transport and Metabolism, Principal Investigator. Sponsor: NIH/NIBIB, Sponsor Award ID: R01EB016741
April 1, 2016 - March 31, 2018 - Novel Ultrashort Echo Time Sequences for Brain MRI, Principal Investigator. Sponsor: NIH/NINDS, Sponsor Award ID: R21NS089004
Education
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, B.S., 06/02, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, M.S., 06/03, Electrical Engineering
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Ph.D., 09/07, Electrical Engineering
University of California – San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Postdoctoral, 09/07-08/11, Radiology and Biomedical Imaging