My research is focused on developing quantitative imaging based biomarkers that can be used for to predict future disease risk or to support clinical decision making in populations or for personalized medicine applications.

Longitudinal Changes in Pericardial Adiposity and Subclinical Atherosclerosis - R01 HL 098445
Obesity in early life in African American and white adults is a factor in premature heart disease and cardiovascular death. We will leverage an existing study of 5,115 individuals with 25 years of follow-up to make new measurements with CT and echocardiography and determine how fat located in the heart and abdomen changes over 10 years of early adult life and influences subsequent heart disease. We are making novel measures related to the remodeling of the coronary arteries from atherosclerosis.
The Cardiovascular Research Grid (CVRG) Project - R24 HL085343
The CVRG is a national resource providing the capability to store, manage, and analyze data on the structure and function of the cardiovascular system in health and disease. The CVRG Project will develop new tools that will enhance the ability of researchers to explore and analyze their data to understand the cause and treatment of heart disease.
Skeletal Muscle Adiposity in Black Men with High Type 2 Diabetes Risk--TOBAGO
We are obtaining and analyzing 1600 CT scans from men of African origin living on the island of Tobago for coronary artery calcium, aortic artery calcium, abdominal adipose tissue volumes, abdominal muscle volumes and composition, pericardial adipose tissue, and liver attenuation. These data will be combined with clinical variables and genetic data to determine how lifestyle, environmental and genetic factors influence cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

I pursue ultrasonic beamforming and elasticity solutions to clinical problems. I am also interested in coupling signal processing advances with interesting ultrasound hardware realizations.

My current beamforming efforts focus on non-linear ultrasound beamforming strategies. I am developing methods for removing clutter induced by multipath and off-axis scattering from the typical signal of interest with minimal distortion. As part of this task, I am also studying approaches to quantify the effect of various mechanisms of in vivo image degradation on perceptions of ultrasound image quality. I am also developing Bayesian estimators for ultrasound displacement estimation. My lab is using these new estimators to pursue new approaches to non-invasively quantify tissue elasticity, especially for the liver. These elasticity approaches have the potential to enable more flexible and lower cost elasticity measurement tools.

Research Fellow 2020 thru 2022

Current: Lead Systems at GE Healthcare

Postdoctoral Researcher 2022 thru 2022

Current: Engineer II, MRI at Abbott

I'm interested in the physiologic mechanisms of salt handling and how the lymphatics system plays a role in tissue sodium storage to make contributions in cardiovascular health. I work with multi-nuclear magnetic resonance imaging methods to better understand these relationships and to explore the biological basis of sodium MR signal.