Fan Lam, an assistant professor of bioengineering, will present "Multiscale, multiparametric biochemical imaging of the brain" at noon on Thursday, Oct. 12 in 1005 Beckman.
Lunch will be provided. Registration is required.
"Multiscale, multiparametric biochemical imaging of the brain"
Advances in imaging technologies have transformed neuroscience by allowing us to map structural and functional organizations of the brain with ever-increasing details. But the tools to probe the rich molecular and cellular complexity and underpinnings of brain functions and diseases are limited. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts on developing and applying novel imaging methods to provide multiscale biochemical characterization of the brain. Specifically, I will discuss our work on in vivo, multidimensional magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging by integrating fast acquisition, physics-based and data-driven modeling, to enable simultaneous, high-resolution mapping of metabolites, neurotransmitters, and their biophysical parameters in both healthy and diseased brains. I will also discuss our team-science-based endeavor on pushing neuroimaging to the epigenetic level via developing a method called eMRI to noninvasively map global DNA methylation in the brain. Finally, I will highlight our recent collaborative work on high-throughput, integrative tissue and single-cell mass spectrometry imaging for multiscale, cell-specific biochemical characterization of neural tissues at a brain-wide scale. We expect these developments to create new tools to help better understand the molecular basis of brain function and diseases, improve diagnosis and treatment assessment.
Fan Lam received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2015. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at UIUC, a full-time faculty member with the Beckman Institute and the director of the Master of Science in Biomedical Image Computing, or MS-BIC, program. He is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the Neuroscience Program. Via multidisciplinary collaborations, his group integrates experimental and computational approaches to develop novel imaging technologies to map and study the biochemical basis of brain function and disease. Lam was a Beckman Institute Graduate Fellow and a Postdoctoral Fellow. He is a Junior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, or the ISMRM; a Senior Member of IEEE; and the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2020. Other awards include a Best Student Paper Award from the International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging in 2015; the Robert T. Chien Memorial Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC in 2015; an NIH-NIBIB Trailblazer Award in 2020; an NIH-NIGMS MIRA R35 Award in 2021, and he was selected as a Scialog Fellow in Advancing Bioimaging in 2023. Lam also serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and a co-chair of the Young Scholar Committee at the World Association for Chinese Biomedical Engineers, or WACBE.
