Professional Experiences

• March 2024 - Present: Visiting Student
  • Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA
  • Supervisor: Dr. Fuyixue Wang and Dr. Zijing Dong
  • Explored Romer-EPTI, a novel MR sequence and reconstruction technique for in vivo mesoscale dMRI. Studied Plug-and-Play Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier (ADMM) for medical image reconstruction.
  • Proposed a physics-driven and deep-prior-regularized reconstruction algorithm, which affords four-fold accelerated Romer-EPTI with equivalent, if not better, image quality compared to fully sampled Romer-EPTI, achieving fast in vivo mesoscale dMRI at 500-\(\mu\)m isotropic resolution on a clinical 3T scanner within a clinically acceptable 20-minute timeframe.
• Sep 2021 - Present: Research Assistant
  • Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research and Imaging Center (BRIC), UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
  • Supervisor: Dr. Gang Li
  • Infant-Dedicated MR Image Registration
    • Conducted a preliminary study investigating the effect of leveraging auxiliary data to improve the accuracy of deep learning-based image registration for infant brain MR images. This work is supported in part by the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship award ($4,000) offered by the UNC Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR).
  • Volumetric atlas construction for the early developing brain
    • Explored the lab’s previous work on infant brain atlas construction. Studied the challenges of applying existing deep learning-based atlas construction frameworks to fetal and infant brain MR images due to low and dynamic tissue contrast.
    • Proposed a deep learning-based framework for infant brain atlas construction that 1. exploits anatomical prior from tissue probability maps to generate anatomically more plausible atlases, 2. constructs tissue probability maps that are necessary for a number of downstream tasks, and 3. accurately captures both the morphological and volumetric changes during early brain development.
    • Currently working on extending the proposed framework to model fetal brain developmental trajectory by leveraging additional anatomical information from reconstructed pial and white matter surfaces.
• Jan 2023 - Present: Learning Assistant
  • Department of Biology, UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
  • Currently working as a Learning Assistant for BIOL 252L: Fundamentals of Human Anatomy and Physiology Laboratory.
  • Responsible for answering questions in class, holding office hours before exams, and proctoring exams.
• Jan 2023 - Present: Undergraduate Volunteer
  • Emergency Department, UNC Medical Center, Chapel Hill, NC
  • Currently working 2 hours every Wednesday night in the Emergency Department at UNC Hospitals.
  • Responsible for answering call bells, rounding on patients, and helping with tubing stations.
• Jun 2019 - July 2019: Student Researcher
  • National Advanced Driver Simulator (NADS), University of Iowa, Coralville, IA
  • Supervisor: Dr. Timothy Brown
  • Partly responsible for a meta-analysis project.
  • Focused on setting up and benchmarking a computer cluster for the lab.
  • The final project was awarded the Best Peer Review Award.