Trainees
Atena Akbari
Postdoctoral FellowBiography: Atena is a postdoctoral fellow at professor Ravi Menon’s lab. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland in Australia, where she investigated the BOLD and VASO fMRI contrast mechanisms in human primary visual and motor cortices. Her research interest is studying the fine-scale brain structures of the human brain using high resolution fMRI techniques.
Nico Arezza
PhD student Medical BioPhysicsBiography: Nico is a PhD student with Dr. Baron. He completed his MSc at Ryerson University where he investigated novel methods for detecting cancer cell death and monitoring treatment response using dynamic light scattering optical coherence tomography. His current work at Robarts focuses on the use of diffusion MRI to study neurological disorders.
Dana Broberg
PhD StudentBiography: Dana is a PhD Student in Medical Biophysics under the supervision of Dr. Robert Bartha. She completed her undergraduate degree in Medical Biophysics at Western University. Her current project is focused on determining the neural correlates of connected speech in neurodegenerative diseases using diffusion MRI.
Nickolas Christidis
PhD student NeuroscienceBiography: Nickolas is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience, supervised by Dr. Ali Khan, with a focus on identifying novel MRI markers to help localize the focus of epileptic seizures using ultra-high field (7T) MRI, my specific interests are the hippocampus in temporal lobe epilepsy and the piriform cortex.
Alicia Cronin
PhD student Medical BioPhysicsBiography: Alicia is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Robert Bartha. She has completed her Bachelor of Science in Biological and Medical Physics with a minor in Mathematics at the University of Guelph. Her current project revolves around the development of a retrospective correction algorithm that will improve the line shape and spectral quality of magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) in the spinal cord. She is also working on characterizing cortical plasticity in patients with cervical spondylotic myelopathy.
Paul Dubovan
PhD Student Medical BiophysicsBiography: Paul is a PhD Student in Dr Barons lab. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Windsor in Medical Physics, where he developed an interest in medical imaging and experimental research. His current project involves the development of real-time eddy current monitoring strategies to eliminate the artefacts they create in MRI.
Audrey Dureux
Postdoctoral AssociateBiography: Audrey is a Postdoctoral associate at professor Stefan Everling’s lab. She completed her PhD in France at the Lyon neuroscience research center where she studied the social dimension of the region of space near the body, termed peripersonal space. She used a multiscale approach to investigate how emotional faces in peripersonal space affects perceptual abilities using behavioral measures, physiological state using measures of pupil diameter and heart rate, and brain activity using fMRI. Being particularly interested on the comparative approach between species, she used similar experimental procedures in both humans and macaques to compare cerebral activity with fMRI. Her current project is to study social interactions in marmosets by investigating neural network of the emotional processing of facial expressions in marmosets using fMRI, associated with their impact on physiological responses.
Amr Eed
Postdoctoral FellowBiography: Amr is a Post doc in the Menon lab. His research involves scanning awake rodent models.
Jack Elkas
Masters studentBiography: Jack is a MSc candidate in Neuroscience under the supervision of Dr. Robert Bartha. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in Neuroscience, where he developed an interest in studying Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment. His current project uses Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy to look at the relationship between metabolic correlates in the motor cortex and gait performance in patients with mild cognitive impairment
Jake Hamilton
Masters StudentBiography: Jake is a MSc candidate in Medical Biophysics under the supervision of Dr. Corey Baron. He completed his BSc at Queen's University, receiving a major in Life Sciences and a minor in Physics. His current work involves studying the link between repeated traumatic brain injury and dementia using advanced diffusion MRI techniques
Seyyed Mohammed Hassan Haddad
Postdoctoral FellowBiography: Dr. Haddad received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering-Communications from Tehran Polytechnic (Amirkabir University of Technology) in 2002 and M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering-Communications from the University of Tehran in 2005. He has held a faculty position in the Department of Electrical Engineering in Shahabdaesh Institute of Higher Education until 2011. He received his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Western Ontario in 2016. Dr. Haddad is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (CFMM) at Robarts Research Institute, supervised by Dr. Robert Bartha.
Dimuthu Hemachandra
Biography: Dimuthu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Biomedical Engineering at UWO. He completed his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and obtained his MSc. in Astrophysics from the University of Western Ontario. His current research project is focused on analyzing the structural connectivity of the brain using Diffusion MRI to find a biomarker for Parkinson’s disease.
Azadeh Jafari
Biography: Azadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in the neuroscience program at Western University. Her current work revolves around the vocalization of marmosets and their fMRI analysis being supervised by Dr. Everling. She received her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering-Electronics from K.N.Toosi University and completed her M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering at Tehran Polytechnic (Amirkabir University of Technology)."
Jason Kai
PhD Student Medical BiophysicsBiography: Jason Kai is a PhD student in Ali Khans lab. His focus in the lab is on the microstructure and shape-informed tractography parcellation using multi-parametric MRI.
Brad Karat
PhD CandidateBiography: Brad is a PhD candidate in the Neuroscience graduate program, Supervised by Dr. Ali Khan. He completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour from McMaster University. His current research focuses on microstructural modelling of the Hippocampus in native and flattened space using diffusion MRI.
Sam Laxer
Masters StudentBiography: Sam is a MSc student working in Dr. Menon's lab. He completed his undergraduate degree in Life Physics from the University of Waterloo. His current project involves the simultaneous recording of awake-mouse neurochemical, electrophysiological and fMRI BOLD signals.
Maryam Mazaffari
PhD student Medical BioPhysicsBiography: Maryam is a PhD candidate for Medical Biophysics, currently supervised by Rob Bartha. Her current project is optimizing pH measurement and modulation at the cellular level using a novel MRI contrast mechanism, called chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST).
Renil Mathew
PhD studentBiography: Renil is a neuroscience PhD student at Menon Lab. He completed his Physics undergrads from Loyola College, India. He did his master’s in physics at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he worked at Doeller lab, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. His current research involves simultaneous EEG-fMRI recording on awake marmoset monkey.
Daniel Menezes Guimarães
Post Doctoral FellowBiography: Dr. Daniel Menezes Guimarães is a Postdoctoral Associate at Robarts Research Institute, working with Dr. Prado and Dr. Bartha. Currently, he is working with a murine model of neurodegenerative disorder (microgliopathy) employing behavioral methods, immunohistochemistry, and diffusion imaging. At the Federal University of Rio the Janeiro, Brazil, he received both his B.Sc., in Biomedical Sciences, and Ph.D., in Basic-Clinical Neuroscience, while working with a model of social isolation. He has a great interest in cognitive and social dysfunctions, which are common symptoms in many neuropsychiatric disorders.
Farah Mushtaha
Masters StudentBiography: I'm co supervised by Corey Baron and Ali Khan. I did my undergrad at western in medical biophysics and doing my masters right now. I work on investigating diffusion MRI with Spiral trajectories.
Naila Rahman
PhD Student Medical BiophysicsBiography: Naila received her undergraduate degree from Windsor in Medical BioPhysics. She is currently with Western University working on her PhD with Dr. Baron as my supervisor. The project she is working on is using microstructural MRI to better understand the biophysics of concussion.
Janahan Selvanayagam
PhD StudentBiography: Janahan is a PhD student in Neuroscience in Dr. Stefan Everling's lab. He completed his BSc in Neuroscience at Brock University. His current research focus is investigating microcircuits in the frontal eye fields and the lateral intraparietal area using intracortical microstimulation, cortical cooling, pharmacology and high-density laminar electrophysiology in the common marmoset.
Alaa Taha
Masters StudentBiography: Alaa is a MESc candidate in Biomedical Engineering supervised by Dr. Jonathan C. Lau and Dr. Ali Khan. He completed his BMSc in Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences here at Western University. His current research interests revolve around improving the accuracy and efficacy of neurosurgical procedures using ultra-high field imaging (>=7-Tesla) and artificial intelligence.
Mary Taylor
PhD CandidateBiography: Mary is a PhD Candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, Supervised by Dr. Ali Khan and Maryam Nouri. She completed her undergraduate degree at Brock University in Neuropsychology. Her work is focused on the use of functional and structural imaging to characterize and monitor network patterns in patients with focal epilepsy, as well as relating these patterns to cognitive performance.
Arun Thurairajah
Masters Student
Esmin Unaran
PhD Student NeuroScienceBiography: Esmin Unaran is a PhD student supervised by Dr. Ravi Menon. She completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology at Yasar University, Izmir, Turkey. She investigates the resting state networks involved in Alzheimer's Disaese and learning dependent myelination in mouse brain.
Mahdieh Varvani Farahani
PhDBiography: Mahdieh is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience, supervised by Dr. Ali Khan. She completed her BSc in Neuroscience at Western University. Her current research focus is on characterising the relationship between memory functioning and hippocampal structure and function in individuals with depression.
Raymond Wong
PhD StudentBiography: Raymond is a PhD Student and a BrainsCAN Scholar in Dr. Stefan Everling’s lab. He completed his BSc in Neuroscience - Neurobiology at Brock University. His research focuses on investigating the frontal eye fields microcircuitry with high-density neural recordings, as well as working memory in the prefrontal cortex of awake behaving marmosets.
Mohamed Yousif
Masters Student
Alessandro Zanini
Postdoctoral AssociateBiography: I completed my PhD at the Claude Bernard University of Lyon, France, where I studied the behavioral effects and fMRI responses induced by the presentation of multisensory stimuli within the peripersonal space (or space surrounding the body) in human and non-human primates. My current research focuses on the behavioral, cognitive and MRI repercussions of alpha-synuclein propagation in marmosets' brain.
