Bio
My broad scientific goal is to investigate neurological disorders with the aim of identifying novel mechanisms that improve understanding of disease pathophysiology and that could lead to novel drug development. I pursue this goal by investigating the genetic risk factors of the respective disease under question, studying how they contribute to disruptions of brain function measured by in vivo imaging techniques, and how they correlate with the presentation of disease-sensitive biomarkers. Within this broader scope, my primary interest is to focus specifically on Alzheimer's disease, elucidating the genetic, molecular, and clinical spectrum of the disease, and hopefully, eventually, contributing to the path towards a cure.
I am a highly interdisciplinary scientist with experience in programming (using various scripting languages), advanced data analyses methods, neuroimaging, and studies of preclinical mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. I also have a long-standing interest in brain function and network dynamics in both health and disease. During my postdoc at Stanford, I have further gained experience into the clinical aspects, imaging approaches, and genetics of Alzheimer’s disease. Altogether, this translates into my current research strategy in which I investigate large-scale multimodal datasets that contain information on genetics, multi-omics, clinical outcome measures, structural and functional brain properties, and other biomarker data.
I am currently an Instructor at Stanford university, in the lab of Dr. Michael D Greicius. My main aims in this lab are to identify genetic factors that may be causative to Alzheimer's disease. Specifically, I aim to uncover genetic risk factors that interact with the Apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene or sex to alter risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Furthermore, I seek to identify how genetic risk associations differ across the intersection of APOE, sex, age, and genetic ancestry. I believe this will allow the identification of novel genes relevant to Alzheimer's disease and contribute to advancing personalized genetic medicine.
During my PhD, supervised by Dr. Marleen Verhoye, Dr. Shella Keilholz and Dr. Georgios A Keliris, I worked on developing dynamic resting state functional (rsf)MRI in mice, which lead to the first observation of mouse Quasi-Periodic patterns, and related applications for Alzheimer's disease research in rodents. I still have an ongoing interest in dynamic rsfMRI research.
