People

Kawin Setsompop is an Associate Professor of Radiology and, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering. His research focuses on the development of novel MRI acquisition methods, with the goal of creating imaging technologies that can be used to help better understand brain structure and function for applications in Healthcare and Health sciences. He received his Master’s degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently a faculty at the A.A. Martinos center for biomedical imaging, MGH, as well as part of the Harvard and MIT faculty. His group has pioneered several widely-used MRI acquisition technologies, a number of which have been successfully translated into FDA-approved clinical products on Siemens, GE, Phillips, United Imaging and Bruker MRI scanners worldwide. These technologies are being used daily to study the brain in both clinical and neuroscientific fields.

Congyu Liao is an Instructor in the Department of Radiology/Radiological Sciences Laboratory. Before joining Stanford University, he worked at Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard medical school as a research fellow with Dr. Setsompop. He has been working in the MRI research field for 7 years since the start of his PhD at Zhejiang University, China, where he was trained in the field of biomedical engineering. His research focuses on the development of new efficient MR acquisition/reconstruction, which will allow for the study of human physiology at the finest scale and detail possible. During his PhD and postdoctoral training, he spent considerable effort developing acquisition and reconstruction techniques for rapid high-resolution quantitative MRI and diffusion-weighted imaging. With the proposed technical developments, his research can provide the tools to help improve our understanding of the human brain for clinical and neuroscientific applications.

Xiaozhi Cao is a postdoctoral fellow whose research focuses on the development of novel MR acquisition and reconstruction methods, especially for fast quantitative imaging and diffusion imaging. After 5-years research on fast multi-parameters quantitative brain imaging, he received his PhD degree in Biomedical engineering from Zhejiang University at 2019 and then joined Dr. Kawin Setsompop's group. His current work involves sampling trajectory optimization, novel sequence design, fast quantitative imaging and motion correction technique.

Nan Wang is postdoctoral fellow in the Radiological Sciences Laboratory in Dr. Setsompop's lab. She received her PhD degree in Bioengineering Department from UCLA in 2020 and worked as a postdoctoral scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center before joining Dr. Setsompop's Lab. Nan has been particularly interested in the development of fast acquisition/reconstruction techniques to improve the performance of MRI. She developed the multitasking dynamic contrast enhanced MRI technique that is able to quantitatively differentiate diseased tissues from normal in multiple organs with reduced dose, high spatiotemporal resolution, and motion-resolved acquisition. She will continue to work on the development of fast multi-parametric MRI techniques.

Zihan Zhou is a postdoctoral fellow interested in quantitative MR imaging, especially for myelin imaging. She is also interested in translation the technologies to clinical and neuroscience research. She joined the lab in 2023 after finishing her Ph.D degree at Zhejiang University, where she researched myelin imaging by diffusion MRI and quantitative MRI. She will continue to work on quantitative MRI and its translation to neuroscience.

Ariel Hannum is a PhD student at Stanford University, in the department of Bioengineering. She is interested in MRI image acquisition and reconstruction for cardiac applications. Her current research focuses on characterizing motion-induced errors in multishot diffusion MRI and developing correction strategies. She is co-advised by Professor Daniel Ennis from the department of Radiology/RSL.

Mahmut Yurt is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford, he received his MSc (2021) and BSc (2019) degrees from Bilkent University, in Turkey, both in Electrical Engineering. His current research interests focus on developing reconstruction, synthesis, and denoising techniques for accelerated magnetic resonance fingerprinting, as well as sequence design and sampling mask optimization for clinical contrast-weighted imaging. 

Itamar Terem is a PhD student, in the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His current research focuses on the development of computational and acquisition techniques to explore the brain tissue mechanical response and clearance mechanician to blood pulsation and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) motion.

Mengze Gao is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Physics at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford, he received his B.E. degree from Tsinghua University in 2022. His current research focuses on developing robust reconstruction and distortion correction techniques for fast MRI.

Mark Nishimura is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Previously, he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2016 and 2018, respectively. He currently works on memory-efficient deep learning techniques for faster and higher-resolution magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF).

Daniel Abraham is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Before starting his PhD, Daniel received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He is currently interested in developing new reconstruction techniques for accelerated MRI.

Yonatan Urman is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford, he earned his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University and dual BSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is also the recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science & Engineering (SGF). His research interests revolve around fast and efficient MRI reconstruction and acquisition techniques, with the aim of making MRI faster, more robust, and widely available.

Uten Yarach is currently a Lecturer and Researcher at Department of Radiologic Technology, Faculty of Associated Medical Sciences, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Prior to this, he had been doing a PhD with Prof. Oliver Speck at BMMR, Magdeburg, Germany (2012-2017), focusing on residual artifact corrections for prospective motion correction for MRI data. After that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Mayo Clinic until 2020, working on a model-based reconstruction for EPI data under supervision of Prof. Joshua Trzasko. In 2021, He has joined Prof. Kawin Setsompop’s group as a Research Collaborator, has focused on image reconstruction with integrating B0 and Eddy current induced distortion corrections for diffusion MRI data.

Itthi Chatnuntawech is a researcher at the National Nanotechnology Center, National Science and Technology Development Agency, Pathum Thani, Thailand, where he has led the Nanoinformatics and Artificial Intelligence Research Team since 2021. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing, and mathematical optimization. He received the B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, in 2011, with a double major in biomedical engineering, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2013 and 2016, respectively. During his Ph.D. study, he developed compressed-sensing-based reconstruction methods for accelerated multi-contrast MRI, magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI), and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM).