Andrei Irimia, Ph.D.

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I am a neuroimaging researcher, biophysicist, computational neuroscientist and, currently, an assistant professor in the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. Throughout my career, I have used multimodal neuroimaging, electrophysiological measurements and computational modeling to study how neurodegeneration and the subsequent degradation of neurocognitive function are affected by neurological disorders, particularly by traumatic brain injury and by other forms of neuropathology which typically involve intracerebral hemorrhage. Treatment of brain injury in older adults is of high priority because over 1.7 million cases of it occur annually in the US alone, with a financial burden in excess of $60 billion/year. Approaches afforded by fields as varied as nonlinear dynamics, network theory, machine learning, multivariate statistics and scientific visualization have allowed me and my collaborators to quantify brain disease evolution and to contribute to the development of novel, patient-tailored approaches to clinical patient care. In collaboration with my colleagues, I have developed the connectogram, which is a unique and attractive approach to the mapping and visualization of brain wiring. Throughout the past 5 years, the connectogram has been adopted at 100+ research sites worldwide and its growing use has been highlighted prominently both in the mainstream media as well as by highly-regarded scientific journals such as Nature and Nature Methods. In particular, one prominent study on the famous historical case of Phineas Gage was featured widely in Discovery Magazine, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, and in many other venues. In conjunction with the opportunities afforded by network theory to model and analyze brain connectivity changes, connectograms has proven to be particularly helpful for the design of patient-tailored rehabilitation protocols for victims of neurological and psychiatric disease.
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