Trainees
Current Trainees
Melanie Matyi
Melanie Matyi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Penn Frontotemporal Degeneration Center (FTDC), mentored by Dr. Lauren Massimo and Dr. Corey McMillan. She is interested in identifying imaging-based biomarkers for disease monitoring and precision medicine with a particular focus on the neural mechanisms contributing to neuropsychiatric symptoms and executive dysfunction in behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration.
Melanie received her PhD in Clinical Science with a focus on neuroimaging methods from the University of Delaware in 2023. Prior to graduate school, she received a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh.
Project title: Neural mechanisms of neuropsychiatric symptoms and executive dysfunction in frontotemporal dementia
Sheina Emrani
Sheina Emrani is a postdoctoral fellow in the Digital Neuropathology Lab (DNPL) at Penn, mentored by Dr. David Irwin. As a neuropsychologist, she is interested in understanding the clinical heterogeneity and clinicopathologic correlates of frontotemporal dementia. Specifically, her work aims to interrogate upstream structural and social determinants of health factors (S/SDOH) and its effect on neuropathology, including Tau, TDP43, and neuroinflammation. Using state-of-the-art tools, including digital pathology and high resolution postmortem MRI, she is currently investigating how neuroinflammation contributes to cognitive impairment, beyond the primary pathology, and how S/SDOH modulates this relationship.
Project title: Neuroinflammation as a contributor of cognitive impairment beyond Tau and TDP proteinopathies.
Astrid Ramos-Rolon
Astrid is a PhD candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Group at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research journey began at the University of Puerto Rico, where she completed her bachelor’s degree. Her involvement in mental health advocacy there sparked a deep interest in neuroscience. At Penn, Astrid joined Dr. Corinde Wiers' lab and transitioned to clinical neuroimaging research. She is interested in investigating the link between substance use disorders and neurodegenerative disease. More specifically her dissertation project focuses on identifying the neurobiological mechanisms underlying smokers' increased susceptibility to cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease.
Project title: Neurobiological mechanisms underlying the interplay between smoking and beta-amyloid deposition in Alzheimer's disease
Omar Vazquez
Omar Vazquez is a Biostatistics PhD candidate at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at Penn. He is advised by Dr. Sharon Xie. Omar’s dissertation aims to develop novel statistical methods for the analysis of doubly truncated survival data with low and high dimensional covariates. His work is motivated in part by applications in neurodegenerative disease research that use autopsy cohorts, which provide a rich set of pathology information for further analysis. His statistical methods can account for the distinct sampling bias that is inherent in these cohorts.
Omar received his Bachelor of Science in Probability & Statistics from UC San Diego in 2020, and his Master of Science in Statistics from UC Irvine in 2022.
Project title: Novel statistical methods and analysis of neuroimaging risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease patient survival
Former Trainees
Evan Gallagher
Project title: Preclinical evaluation of [18F]ROStrace as an in vivo biomarker of oxidative stress in tauopathies
