Dr. Clarissa Zimmerman Cooley is an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on advancing MRI hardware and system architectures to expand access to high-quality imaging in resource-constrained and point-of-care settings. She works primarily in portable, low-field MRI, developing compact brain scanners based on permanent magnet arrays paired with novel RF, encoding, and reconstruction strategies. Her group studies how to overcome the physical limitations that have historically constrained low-field MRI performance, with particular attention to signal-to-noise ratio, electromagnetic interference, and system-level integration.

A major current focus of her laboratory is the development of a dedicated portable MRI scanner for imaging critically ill neonates in the NICU. This work aims to enable safe bedside brain imaging without transporting fragile patients to conventional high-field systems. The project combines magnet design, RF coil optimization, and adaptive electromagnetic interference mitigation to allow reliable operation in complex hospital environments. In particular, her work on EMI characterization and cancellation has enabled low-field MRI to function outside traditional RF-shielded rooms, an important step toward practical clinical deployment.

Earlier in her career, Dr. Cooley led hardware development efforts in Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) at MGH, including the design of a single-sided MPI detector for functional brain imaging studies in rodents. That work demonstrated the feasibility of detecting cerebral blood volume changes with MPI and helped lay the foundation for subsequent functional MPI system development. Across these efforts, her research centers on careful engineering of imaging hardware to expand where and how advanced imaging technologies can be used.