Team

Pronouns: she/her

erin.beck@mssm.edu

Erin is the principal investigator of the lab. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and then earned her MD/PhD from Columbia University in the lab of Dr. Brian McCabe. She did her neurology residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University and then did a fellowship in neuroimmunology at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke with Dr. Daniel Reich. In her clinical practice she sees patients with multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune disorders affecting the brain and spinal cord.

Pronouns: she/her

Julia is a Clinical Research Coordinator. She earned her B.S. in Molecular Genetics with a Spanish minor at The Ohio State University.

In the Beck Lab, she primarily works on the 7T MRI longitudinal study where she recruits patients with multiple sclerosis and other neuroinflammatory disorders to undergo advanced 7T MR imaging as well as neuropsychological testing. Before coming to the Beck Lab, she worked on eMERGE IV, an NHGRI-funded project focused on the implementation of genetic risk testing in diverse New York City populations. She is driven to conduct research in her future medical career that combines her passions of neurology and genetics, with a focus on novel treatments and improved patient care.

Pronouns: he/him

Francesco is a postdoctoral research fellow. He obtained his B.S. in Physics and a Master’s degree in Applied Physics at the University of Bologna, Italy. His master thesis was done in collaboration with Fraunhofer Mevis in Bremen, Germany. There, he worked on the automatic segmentation of bones in abdominal CT scans with deep learning methods. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, supervised by Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran and Dr. Meritxell Bach Cuadra. His doctoral thesis focused on the development of machine learning-based methods for the automated assessment of multiple sclerosis imaging biomarkers using both high and ultra-high field MRI. He now focuses on leveraging novel machine-learning approaches to account for multiple sclerosis lesion evolution over time. Further, he aims at combining imaging biomarkers with clinical and demographic variables to cluster cognitive phenotypes as well as develop risk prediction models for disease progression.

Pronouns: he/him

Jonadab is a postdoctoral research fellow. He graduated with a degree in Medicine from the Fluminense Federal University, in Brazil. He studied at UCLA during medical school, where he also worked on brain tumor imaging research. Driven by a particular interest in neuroimaging, he has worked with different modalities in clinical studies, including structural and functional MRI, EEG source localization, and tractography. As a future neurologist, Jonadab is interested in the interplay between brain lesions and their clinical and cognitive manifestations. Currently, he uses ultra-high field MRI to study the mechanisms of cortical lesion formation and repair, as well as how these processes are related to brain remodeling and disease progression.