Current Members
Roland Henry, PhD
Principal Investigator
Dr. Henry is the Rachleff Distinguished Professor in the Department of Neurology where he is Director of the Imaging Program for the Division of Neuroinflammation and Glial Biology. Dr. Henry has vast experience in quantitative neurological imaging in his 24 years at UCSF, and has designed, implemented, and translated many algorithms for quantitative image analysis and clinical applications. Some technical developments include development and validation of non-parametric bootstrap methods in diffusion MRI, pre-operative mapping of eloquent pathways for Neurosurgery applications, multicenter harmonization of MRI volumetry. His primary focus is the development and application of MR techniques for the study of Multiple Sclerosis and neuroinflammatory disorders. He leads the MRI imaging program for the International MS Genetic Consortium including the development of multisite MRI – genotype efforts across 22 sites worldwide. Dr. Henry has also developed and applied techniques for MRI of spinal cord grey and white matter for Multiple Sclerosis which he has shown to be instrumental in progressive Multiple Sclerosis.
Nico Papinutto, PhD
Nico Papinutto is an MR Physicist with extensive expertise in the development, implementation, and processing of MRI quantitative protocols and data. His work over the past 10 years has been focused on technical and research neuroimaging single-site and multi-site collaborative studies.
Dr. Papinutto received his PhD in Solid State Physics from the University of Pavia, Italy, in January 2006. His research at that time was focused on the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to understand the intriguing magnetic properties of strongly correlated electron systems and 2D quantum Heisenberg anti-ferromagnets, with the goal of understanding the mechanism of high Tc superconductivity.
At the end of 2005, following his interests for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Dr. Papinutto joined the newborn Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) at the University of Trento, Italy, as MR Physicist of the Bruker MedSpec 4T human head scanner. For the first three years, Dr. Papinutto contributed with a small group of colleagues to the construction, set-up, logistical organization and development of the center from its start.
Dr. Papinutto had been employed at CIMeC for 7 years, until October 2012, and he mostly worked on the optimization of MRI methods and analysis of structural, functional and diffusion data in the field of Cognitive Neurosciences.
Dr. Papinutto joined UCSF and Dr. Roland Henry’s Lab in November 2012 as a post-doc and MR Physicist of the Siemens Skyra 3T scanner dedicated to multiple sclerosis studies. He was promoted after 2 years to Associate Specialist. Since November 2015, Dr. Papinutto is an Associate Researcher in the Department of Neurology at UCSF. In the last 3 years his work has been mostly focused on quantitative spinal cord imaging in multiple sclerosis and other neurological diseases.
Jung-Jiin (Jason) Hsu, PhD
Jung-Jiin Hsu, Ph.D., also known as Jason Hsu, is a physicist with research interests in translating the theoretical aspects of physics for biomedical application. He develops novel NMR/MRI techniques and methodologies and investigates the use of magnetic resonance in health and disease, and has more than 17 years of experience in research and development for clinical and pre-clinical application with NMR/MRI instruments including desk-top, in-house built, and commercial scanners and spectrometers.
Bill Stern
Bill Stern, RT(R)(MR) received his BA from Haverford College and his Radiologic Technologist education and training at Penn Medicine - Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Bill has been the lead MR technologist for the 3T Skyra scanner that provides brain and spinal cord imaging for the Henry Lab.
Jennifer Arjona, MA
Jennifer Arjona received her B.A. from the University of California, Irvine, and her M.A. in Psychology from the Universidad de Sevilla, in Seville, Spain. She has extensive experience working on a wide variety of research studies, both in Europe and the US.
Jennifer joined UCSF in 2015 as a Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC), where she collaborated on several studies investigating the effects cognitive training exercises have on improving cognitive functioning in adolescents and young adults with high risk symptoms of psychosis, and individuals with recent-onset and chronic schizophrenia.
Currently, she is the Administration Manager and Senior CRC for Dr. Roland Henry’s Lab and coordinates various studies that obtain brain and spinal cord imaging, and which aim to improve care provided at regular standard of care visits for Multiple Sclerosis patients.
Amber Alexander
Amber Alexander is a neuroscience researcher pursuing her ultimate goal of obtaining a PhD in the physics and engineering field. As a Project Manager in Dr. Roland Henry's laboratory, her work involves managing several clinical trials and analyzing magnetic resonance images (MRI) for single-site and multi-site studies.
Since 2018 she has presented posters of her work at the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS), American Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS), and the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting. Her research also received honorable mention at the North American Imaging in Multiple Sclerosis (NAIMS) annual meeting.
Simone Sacco, MD
Simone Sacco is an MD and obtained his degree at University of Pavia, Italy in 2013. He is currently a resident in radiology at the University of Pavia, where from the beginning he has based his career on the study of neurological diseases. He will take part as a visiting scholar to the MS group for the next year.
Shuiting Cheng
Shuiting Cheng received her M.S. in biomedical engineering at University of Nevada, Reno. Her thesis was structural and functional plasticity of vision in hydrocephaly. After graduation, she joined UCSF in Oct 2017. Since then she has focused on processing and analyzing brain and spinal cord images and developing workflows and pipelines for individual projects.
Jacob Mallott
Jacob Mallott received his BA in neuroscience at Oberlin College and a Master’s degree in biomedical imaging at UCSF. His Master's thesis analyzed regional effects of concussion on diffusion tensor imaging metrics in a population of scholastic athletes. His current focus is on management of clinical trial image data, in addition to various other projects related to MRI image processing and analysis.
Haojun (Holly) Zhao, MS
Holly obtained her M.S and B.S degrees in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University and is pursuing her ultimate goal of obtaining a PhD in biomedical engineering field. She joined Dr. Roland Henry laboratory as a Staff Research Associate II since August 2022. She is working on developing and running pipelines for the processing and analyzing of advanced MRI imaging data on patients with Multiple Sclerosis. She also supports various clinical studies by providing quantitative MRI metrics, managing and spawning analysis for clinical trial image data, and performing MRI data classification.
Past Members
Eduardo Caverzasi, MD
Antje Bischof, MD
Dr. Antje Bischof is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Neurology at UCSF. She is a Swiss board-certified neurologist with subspecialty interest in neuroimaging. She earned her medical degree at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and completed her residency in neurology at the University Hospital Basel, Switzerland, where she specialized in neuroimmunology.
She holds a long-standing interest in the development of biomarkers to adequately monitor and predict changes relevant to the evolution of neurological diseases including multiple sclerosis and vasculitic neuropathy. With her work she aims to expand our understanding of the mechanisms underlying neuronal damage and disability accumulation to uncover disease processes that may be modifiable early in the disease course through therapeutic interventions. During her fellowship at UCSF, she has been working on identifying MRI metrics to predict and monitor the evolution of progressive MS by using conventional and advanced neuroimaging techniques that can be implemented in the clinical setting.
Bago Amirbekian, PhD
Esha Datta, PhD
Tristan Gundel
Kesshi Jordan, PhD
Anisha Keshavan, PhD
Mahir Khan
Mahir Khan is a staff researcher for the Henry Lab. He received his B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Rochester and his M.S. in Physiology from Georgetown University. He has a background in developing automated image processing pipelines for a variety of clinical purposes. Mahir’s current work involves developing a pipeline for obtaining longitudinal brain and spinal cord metrics for use in clinical studies.
Gina Kirkish
Gina Kirkish received a Master’s degree in biomedical imaging at UCSF in March 2016 and has a Bachelor’s degree in cognitive science, specializing in neuroscience from UCSD. Her Master’s thesis focused on using functional MRI to improve our understanding of motor deficits in Parkinson’s disease. Gina’s current work involves implementing FreeSurfer quality control methods, performing fMRI resting state data analysis, developing various image processing scripts for both Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease datasets, and archiving/transferring MR image data.
Jayaji Moré
Brian Nguyen
Brian Nguyen received his B.S. in Neuroscience from UC Santa Cruz in 2019. Prior to joining our team, he interned at Dr. Susana Ortiz’s lab at the UCSF Department of Dermatology for Cancer Research where he helped with melanoma research for two years. As a research associate in Dr. Roland Henry’s laboratory, Brian assists clinical researchers in various studies on Multiple Sclerosis patients.
Anand Rajesh, BS
Anand Rajesh received his B.S. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 2017. At Brown University, Anand worked in Dr. Asaad’s lab researching non-human-primate methods of learning as well as was a member of Brown’s Men’s Crew Team for four years. In the lab, he currently sees patients receiving MRI scans as well as develops novel image segmentation algorithms for the spinal cord and optimizes existing neuroimaging processing infrastructures and pipelines to enhance the diagnostic relevance of imaging for clinicians.
Alyssa Zhu
