Education

• Postdoctoral Scholar, Multimodal Neuroimaging, UCLA, 2013
• Postdoctoral Scholar, Brain Mapping & Neurophysiology, UC San Diego, 2010
• MS, PhD, Biophysics, Vanderbilt University, 2007
• MS, Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, 2004
• BA, Computer Science & Mathematics, summa cum laude, Lipscomb University, 2002

Research

• Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in older adults
• Relationship between TBI and dementia
• Multimodal neuroimaging

Affiliations

• Faculty Affiliate, USC Neuroscience Graduate Program

Overview

Andrei Irimia, PhD, is a computational neuroscientist, neurogerontologist, biomedical engineering researcher and biophysicist whose interests cover, in a broad sense, the topics of neural injury, degeneration, plasticity and repair. His research utilizes computational biology approaches and multimodal imaging to study how brain connectivity alterations caused by insults to the brain contribute to connectome reorganization and to cognitive degradation & recovery. A key component of this research is the relationship between brain injury, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, dementia and how these conditions interact with one another. Upon completion of a bachelor’s degree in computer science & mathematics, he was awarded an MS degree in computer science (medical image processing), an MS and a PhD in biophysics (pathophysiology), all from Vanderbilt University.

Following postdoctoral studies at UCSD and UCLA, he joined the Keck School of Medicine of USC as a junior faculty member, from where he was recruited by the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, where he is now Assistant Professor of Gerontology and Neuroscience. He has training and expertise in both biomedical as well as electrical engineering systems, and his experience with the segmentation, morphometry and quantitative analysis of neuroimaging data has allowed him and his colleagues to pioneer award-winning approaches for the visualization of the human connectome. These strategies have facilitated contributions to current knowledge on brain networks, neural injury, vascular neuropathology and neurodegeneration in atypical aging. Irimia has published extensively on MRI physics, atomic structure theory, bioengineering, neurophysiology, bioelectromagnetism, inverse localization of human cortical activity, nonlinear dynamics of neural networks, computational neurobiology & neuroinformatics, data science, machine intelligence, neurenteric physiology, multivariate statistical inference, as well as on the applications of differential geometry and elliptic/harmonic theory to neuroscience.

His research is being funded by the National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) through the R01 mechanism. He has co-authored 90+ peer-reviewed publications and 200+ research abstracts, he has delivered 40+ invited lectures and received 80+ academic honors and awards, both national and international. His research has been covered by Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Nature, Nature Methods, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other venues. More recently, his findings on neural injury and brain networks have been described in several neuroscience textbooks. Irimia has developed and taught a popular graduate course on neuroimaging data analysis using magnetic resonance imaging at USC, where he is a member of both the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program (NGP) and the Multidisciplinary Training Program in Gerontology. He is also a member of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute for Electronic and Electric Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (IEEE EMBS) and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS).