For 20+ years, I have worked as faculty in the Department of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Citigroup Biomedical Imaging Center. My work is to initiate and facilitate research imaging studies in both pre-clinical and clinical subjects from both internal and external groups. As a result of projects that I have both initiated and collaborated on, I am the author of over 125 peer reviewed publications across many fields of medical imaging including MRI and PET. Although not required in the research community, I obtained board certification in 2003 both as a Diagnostic Radiological Medical Physicist with the State of New York and as a Diplomate in MRI from the American Board of Medical Physics. I am also the Vice Chair for the ABMP MRI Certification committee.

My PhD work combined both MRI and PET analysis of a novel tracer targeting Glioblastoma Multiforme brain tumors with radiotherapy. I subsequently completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Medical Physics at MSKCC focusing on Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI of pediatric osteogenic and Ewing’s sarcomas and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of prostate cancer. My laboratory at WCM developed the first whole brain MRI biomarker using principal component analysis that correlated with disease progression in the pediatric neurodegenerative disease CLN2. This work continued in an international clinical trial of Brineura® (Biomarin Pharmaceuticals) which was the first drug approved to treat CLN2 using enzyme replacement therapy resulting in a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet Neurology.

I was just awarded an R01 with a score in the top 1% [R01HL167003-01A1] as MPI from the National Heart Lung & Blood Institute with my clinical collaborator to study physiologic phenotyping of chronic lung disease of prematurity using MRI. We are pioneering the use of a novel phase-resolved functional lung (PREFUL) MRI sequence that does not require sedation, contrast administration or radiation to measure both ventilation and perfusion defects as well as pulmonary perfusion in this vulnerable infant population. This information on lung function cannot be achieved by any other means. Our work at the new Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns will provide information on the root causes of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and will assign a novel patient specific severity score (ALP) to each infant that has never been done. I was also awarded an RF1-AG078245-01 from the NIA as a multiple PI with a colleague from Rutgers examining permeability, demyelination and neurodegeneration in an aged mouse model of AD (Tg6799) and a knock-in rat model of Familiar Danish Dementia.

Additional information may be found at my lab page at the MRI Research Institute.