The Group

Current members of the OMG

Blaise deB. Frederick, Ph.D.

Blaise Frederick is an Associate Professor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and Associate Biophysicist, McLean Hospital. He is also Director of the Technical and Instrumentation Core at the Brain Imaging Center. He received a BS in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Biophysics from the University of California at Berkeley. His training is in MR physics, and his PhD thesis is entitled “Three Dimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging of Sodium Ions Using Stochastic Excitation and Oscillating Gradients”. He is the Director of the OMG, and his research is focused on multimodal acquisition and processing for hemodynamic quantitation and physiological denoising of BOLD data. His hobbies include photography, cooking and eating unusual foods, winemaking, and long walks on the beach.


Blaise Frederick, Ph.D. McLean Imaging Center 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478 Tel: (617)855-3708

Email: bbfrederick@mclean.harvard.edu

Up to date publication lists can be found here: ResearcherID, Google Scholar, NCBI

Lia M. Hocke, Ph.D.

Lia Maria Hocke received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University in 2015 and went on to a postdoc at the University of Calgary. She studied Psychology and Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Since 2010 she worked under the supervision of Dr. Frederick and Dr. Tong at McLean Hospital as part of her Research Masters in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience and her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Tufts. She established theoretical and methodological research skills in the fields of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), including optimization of acquisition (development of fMRI-compatible NIRS probes) and analysis (MATLAB, FSL & SPM) of fNIRS data, on its own and with concurrent fMRI.

Lia Hocke, Ph.D.

McLean Imaging Center 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478 Tel: (617)855-XXXX

Email: lhocke@mclean.harvard.edu

Serdar Aslan, Ph.D.

Serdar Aslan, PhD, works at the intersection of the neuroscience, machine learning, deep learning, signals and systems, various mathematical areas, control theory, computational optimal transport graph theory, random matrix theory, and detection and estimation theory. He specializes in various computational techniques. As a research fellow at Opto-Magnetic Group, he is working on improving computational techniques for fMRI data analysis.

Aslan has participated in lab projects including working on inference problems for hemodynamic responses, developing techniques to estimate simultaneously latent hemodynamic state and parameter values from BOLD data, and extracting successfully cardiac signal component from fMRI data. He has also worked to perform machine learning techniques to estimate blood territory regions of the voxels beginning from rs-fMRI data and developed algorithms to denoise subject level blood delay maps. In addition, the lab has implemented discrete pattern recognition techniques to detect brain states.

Serdar Aslan, Ph.D.

McLean Imaging Center 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478 Tel: (617)855-3361

Email: saslan@mclean.harvard.edu

Up to date publication lists can be found here: ResearcherID, Google Scholar

Former members of the OMG

Yunjie Tong, Ph.D.

Yunjie Tong became an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University in January, 2017. He is originally from Beijing, China, where he received his BS degree in Physics from Beijing University and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Tufts University. His thesis topic was on multimodal functional brain imaging and fast optical imaging of peripheral nerves. His current work includes concurrent functional MRI and functional near infrared spectroscopy and developments of new experimental and analytical methods in functional brain imaging. He enjoys travel as much as science. When he could not travel, he does running and rock climbing besides science.

Yunjie Tong, Ph.D.

Rm 2019, Weldon School of Biomedical EngineeringPurdue UniversityWest Lafayette IN 47907-2032 USATel: (765)494-0198

Email: tong61@purdue.edu

Up to date publication lists can be found here: ResearcherID, Google Scholar

Kimberly P. Lindsey, Ph.D.

Kimberly Lindsey was an instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Assistant Research Pharmacologist, and Chief of Pharmacologic Imaging at McLean Hospital. She received a BA in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in Biological and Biomedical Science (Molecular and Systems Pharmacology) from Emory University in Atlanta. Her training was in behavioral psychopharmacology of abused drugs and in in vivo neuroimaging of the effects of acute drug administrations in human and nonhuman primates. Her research was focused on nicotine and non-nicotine factors that affect the reinforcing properties of tobacco cigarette smoking.

Full publication list can be found here: ResearcherID

Sinem Burcu Erdogan, Ph.D.

Sinem Burcu Erdoğan is an assistant professor of Medical Engineering at Acıbadem University. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2014. During her graduate school training, she worked in the design and optimization of a custom made functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) instrument for monitoring brain hemodynamics, and developed data processing tools for multimodal fNIRS-fMRI data analysis. Sinem has a deep interest in combining multimodal neuroimaging data analysis methods to understand the distinct features of oscillatory brain hemodynamics in healthy individuals and in persons with neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Currently, she is working with the OMG on a physiological denoising method for improving sensitivity and specificity of fMRI data.

Sinem Burcu Erdogan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Medical Eng.Acıbadem UniversityKerem Aydınlar KampüsüKayışdağı Cad. No.32Ataşehir/İstanbul 34752Tel: +90 500 4175

Email: sinem.erdogan@acibadem.edu.tr

Yingwei Li, Ph.D.

Li Yingwei is a Professor in the School of Information Science and Engineering of Yanshan University, China. He obtained his MSc and PhD degrees in Circuits and Systems at the same university in 2003 and 2008, respectively. His research interests cover the intelligent sensing technology and instrumentation, digital signal processing and information fusion. He worked with the OMG on the design of portable NIRS instrumentation for blood flow assessment from 2015-2017.


Yingwei Li, Ph.D.School of Information Science and EngineeringYanshan UniversityQinhuangdao, Hebei 066004China

Email: lyw@ysu.edu.cn

Nicolette Schwarz, Ph.D.

Nicolette Schwarz, Ph.D.

McLean Imaging Center 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478 Tel: (617)855-3132

Email: nschwarz@mclean.harvard.edu

Up to date publication lists can be found here: ResearcherID, Google Scholar

Megan Shevenell

Megan Shevenell

McLean Imaging Center 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478 Tel: (617)855-3460

Email: mshevenell@mclean.harvard.edu


Michael Rohan, Ph.D.

Michael Rohan, Ph.D.

McLean Imaging Center 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478 Tel: (617)855-3127

Email: mrohan@mclean.harvard.edu

Up to date publication lists can be found here: ResearcherID, Google Scholar