Bio-X SIGF Graduate Student Fellow

Awarded in 2015
Home Department: Neurosciences, MSTP
Faculty Advisors: Karl Deisseroth (Bioengineering, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences), Seung Kim (Developmental Biology), Krishna Shenoy (Electrical Engineering), and David Lyons (Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences)

Research Title: Pathways to clinical CLARITY: methodologies for transparent-volume quantitative analysis of irregular, soft, and heterogeneous tissues in development and disease

Research Description: Developmental biology and clinical pathology have been limited by the need to cut samples into thin sections in order to analyze their structural and molecular properties. Brian is developing new chemical methods for transforming tissues into optically transparent hydrogels, which will enable scientists and clinicians to view single cells deep within solid, intact, 3-dimensional blocks of tissues without cutting them open - a class of technologies and associated computational tools known as CLARITY. Brian will use this to study a variety of biological problems relevant to embryonic development and clinical diagnostics.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Brian is a resident physician in neurosurgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital.