Welcome to MR SCIENCE Laboratory postdoctoral associate Dr. Carlotta Ianniello, the newest member of the portable scanner multi-coil hardware and magnetic resonance imaging team, and Ph.D. graduate student Ron Instrella, the newest member of the in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy team.
Dr. Carlotta Ianniello has over 7 years of experience in MRI research. Her first contribution in MRI research was in 2014 with the development of a general formula for tissue mimicking MRI phantoms that is now available as a toolbox on the NIH website. Such phantoms, whose electrical properties can match those of human tissues, are beneficial in many MR applications ranging from RF coil design to MR safety. In 2021 she earned her PhD in Biomedical Imaging from New York University, where her research focused on multinuclear imaging of the breast via novel hardware and processing pipelines. The project involved designing and building a tailored dual tuned (proton/sodium) bilateral breast coil for the purpose of investigating correlates between sodium concentration and breast cancer outcomes. She developed a pipeline to improve the specificity of sodium as a biomarker by disentangling the intra- and extracellular components of the total sodium concentration in breast lesions.
Ronald Instrella is an incoming doctoral student with a wide range of engineering and research experience in biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and software development. At Stanford, his undergraduate work focused on motion correction thermometry for applications using MR-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS). In 2015, his interest in image processing led to projects on remote sensing of shallow marine environments using small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) at NASA Ames Research Center. He officially became a federal civil servant in 2020, and since 2017 has served as a software engineer at NASA's Intelligent Systems Division, contributing to systems related to extravehicular activity (EVA), NASA’s Urban Air Mobility (UAM) campaign, and the agency’s technology transfer program.
More details can be found here on the MR SCIENCE Laboratory People page. We look forward to witnessing your research in action!
