Sue Kulason, a second year graduate student in the department of Biomedical Engineering, the Center Imaging Science and Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, received the Fulbright Scholarship to travel to the Centre de mathématiques et de leurs applications (CMLA) at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France. She will be working on a year long neurodegenerative modeling project with Dr. Alain Trouvé’s lab. The goal of the project is to 1) measure the accuracy and sensitivity of methods used to detect changes in brain shape from high resolution MRI scans and 2) determine where atrophy occurs that explains the shape changes seen in Alzheimer’s Disease. The study will focus on three areas of the brain that are most closely associated with Alzheimer’s Disease: hippocampus, amygdala, and entorhinal cortex. A new mechanistic cell layer model will be coupled with a sophisticated method to detect shape change in MRI (Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping) to investigate the mechanisms of atrophy in Alzheimer’s Disease.

Congratulations Sue, and good luck with your research!