Faculty
Hans Johnson - Assistant Professor
Hans Johnson has received formal training in biomedical, electrical and computer engineering, which provides a solid foundation for his academic research objective of accelerating brain research through development of automated software processes. Johnson is the lead developer on 14 projects hosted by the Neuroinformatics Tools and Resources Clearing House. He is also the 13th most prolific contributor to the Insight Toolkit package and the president of the Insight Software Consortium. Johnson has been significantly involved in several imaging and informatics projects that focused on developing the tools necessary to monitor and manage large-scale, multi-site projects. In particular, he is the core leader for informatics of a 32-site, longitudinal study called PREDICT-HD that is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Jatin Vaidya - Assistant Professor
Jatin Vaidya is an associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa. Jatin holds a doctorate degree in psychology and has completed a fellowship in neuroimaging of mental illness. His primary area of interest is in the neurobiology of emotion and motivation. Using structural and function imaging in conjunction with psychometric and behavioral indices, Jatin also examines how these processes change and develop over time and in relation to neurodegeneration.
Staff
Eric Axelson - Research Specialist
Eric Axelson joined the Iowa Neuroimaging Consortium (INC) at the University of Iowa in 2003. Axelson has been the primary imaging research specialist on almost 10 major grants, including to multi-site studies. He has expertise in the preprocessing, quality control, and troubleshooting of automated neuroimaging pipelines developed by his group. Axelson has been the first to test new software and give feedback to developers on bugs and potential improvements. He is one of the main raters on the quality control effort, and his expertise drives the process improvements to capture more and more data. Axelson's experience with manual processing is valuable in troubleshooting problem data and correcting it for further automated processes. He is also charged with creating datasets for investigators and running small projects to investigate issues critical to his group and the consortium. Axelson has attended conferences and workshops over the years to further his knowledge base in neuroimaging, including four conferences by the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. Due to his long experience in the field and rapid processing abilities, he is vital near important deadlines as he can accelerate his group efforts.
Jessica Forbes - Graduate Research Assistant
Jessica Forbes began working for the Iowa Neuroimaging Consortium (INC) in late 2011. Forbes has over three years of programming experience and her skill set includes Python, Sqlite, Nipype, Bash, and MATLAB. She helped lead the development of the ANTS Template Building Nipype pipeline and has written several Python scripts for image processing. Forbes is in charge of FreeSurfer image quality reviews for PREDICT-HD and TRACK-On HD as well as the development of an in-house FreeSurfer image viewer that story quality assessments in a Sqlite database. She has created tutorials for editing FreeSurfer cortical labels and has taught several research assistants the process. Forbes has also processed and reviewed DTI images using Slicer 4.1 and is reliable in tracing human and mice brains using Brains2.
Forbes completed bachelor's degrees in biology and mathematics in May 2011. Before joining the University of Iowa, she participated in the AMGEN Scholars Research Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Her project was to assess the spatial variability of a semi-automated method of glioma segmentation on magnetic resonance images. Forbes also completed two internships at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which focused on computational proteomics.
Eun Young (Regina) Kim - Postdoctoral Fellow
Eun Young (Regina) Kim received her Ph.D. In December 2013 from the Biomedical Engineering department at the University of Iowa. Kim began working for the Iowa Neuroimaging Consortium (INC) in late 2007. Kim's research focuses on segmentation of regions of interest with machine-learning, statistical techniques, and highly deformable registration in the auto-pipeline for large-scale and multi-site data. Her skill set includes: programming language like C/C++, Java, Python, Perl, Lisp, CLIPS, UNIX Shell scripting, TCL, XML, and SQL; source code management using SVM and Git; and statistical software including R, SAS, and MATLAB. Kim earned a mater's degree in biomedical engineering in 2010 and is the process of earning doctorate degree.
Ali Ghayoor - Graduate Research Assistant
Ali Ghayoor earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2010 and joined the Department of Psychiatry in early 2011. Ghayoor is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering with a focus on medical image processing. His areas of interest include highly deformable and multi-level image registration, and automatic detection of anatomical landmarks in magnetic resonance imaging scans of the human brain for large-scale and multi-site data.
Ghayoor's areas of expertise are in variety of languages and technologies, including: C/C++, Python, Linux shell scripting, XML, HTML, MATLAB, and Git. Also, he is active in medical imaging open-source applications development and contributes in ITK developers’ community.