Research Interests
My main research interest is developing noninvasive functional neuroimaging techniques. From an engineering perspective, the brain is a very complicated system that can be modeled as a black box:
The input to the system is an experimental paradigm, and the output is the response to the stimulus. However, the "brain response" can't be measured directly. We have to either measure a neural response by using techniques that measure the electric or magnetic fields of the brain, or the vascular response by measuring change in blood flow using fMRI or NIRS.
There are many tools from engineering that can help approach this problem. On the hardware side, there are the imaging techniques themselves, as well as technology for simultaneous physiology monitoring. On the software side, there are methods of signal processing, system characterization, and mathematical modeling.
My research focuses on the fundamental question: How can we characterize the function of the brain? And what useful things can we do with this characterization once we've found it?