A hearty Airan Lab welcome to James Bishop PhD, who is joining the lab as part of his prestigious Stanford Molecular Imaging Scholars fellowship. James has in depth interest in solving the debilitating condition of chronic pain. He joins us after completing initial postdoctoral training with friends-of-the-lab and collaborators Nolan Williams MD and David Spiegel MD in Stanford Psychiatry, working to treat patients suffering from chronic pain using TMS. James did his undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech before working as a research assistant at Harvard for several years, where he used a variety of cutting-edge techniques including optogenetics and advanced functional MRI methods to study pain both in animal models and clinical populations. He then completed his PhD training with Magdalena Naylor MD PhD & Helene Langevin MD at the University of Vermont, using neuroimaging to study chronic pain in human subjects. In our group, he will work with us, Michelle James PhD, and Sandip Biswal MD to use ultrasonic drug uncaging to modulate pain responses, and image the resultant effects using novel PET tracers for pain imaging, in animal models of chronic pain secondary to cancer.

Dr. Muna Aryal has been named as a recipient of a Stanford SCIT fellowship! This is a prestigious training program for postdoctoral fellows working on novel and interdisciplinary solutions for cancer imaging. For her project, Muna will work collaboratively between the Dahl and Airan labs to develop a fusion of focused ultrasound, passive acoustic imaging (PAI), and PET imaging to determine a method to calibrate the degree of in vivo ultrasonic drug uncaging using nanodroplets. She will then apply this method in a large animal model, as a prerequisite to clinical translation. This work will build on her already amazing work on quantifying the efficacy of ultrasonic drug uncaging in small animals, and her PhD thesis work on ultrasound-mediated blood brain barrier opening for drug delivery.

Congratulations Muna!!

More information can be found here: http://med.stanford.edu/scitprogram/trainees.html

We are looking for bright and motivated postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates to join our group! Please see our recent postdoc announcement. Interested postdoc candidates, potential graduate rotation students, and motivated undergraduates should send inquiries to rairan -at- stanford.edu.