Bikek Dhakal

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, working under the mentorship of Prof. John C. Gore. My research focuses on magnetic resonance microscopy, with an emphasis on developing hardware, pulse sequences, and image-processing methods to achieve ultra-high spatial resolution imaging (~10–40 µm) on a 15.2 Tesla preclinical MRI system.

A central part of my work involves designing and fabricating highly SNR-efficient micro-imaging coils tailored for ultra-high field systems, while also leveraging fast pulse sequences such as FSE, EPI, and GRASE. I am further developing approaches that integrate compressed sensing acceleration with magnetic resonance microscopy, enabling high-resolution imaging of larger mammalian neural tissue samples.

Together, these advances are applied to the study of spinal cord injury and other disease models, where multiple MR contrasts—including T1/T2, diffusion, and quantitative magnetization transfer (qMT)—provide insights into tissue microstructure and mechanisms of recovery.