On December 18, 2025, Tisha Boodooram successfully proposed her PhD research in the Buckley Lab. Her work focuses on advancing diffuse optical spectroscopy to enable accurate and repeatable bedside measurements of cerebral hemodynamics.

Cerebral hemodynamics are tightly regulated to meet the brain’s high metabolic demands, but neurological diseases can disrupt this balance, making accurate and repeatable monitoring clinically valuable. Tisha’s research aims to establish the translational value of absolute, bedside, microvascular hemodynamic measurements across acute and chronic neurological diseases, overcoming limitations of existing modalities and prior relative-only optical approaches.

We are so proud of Tisha for reaching this important milestone and are excited to see her work continue to grow.

In the Buckley Lab’s latest publication in Biomedical Optics Express, Giovani Martins et al. demonstrates that cerebral blood flow measured by Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy, a portable, noninvasive light-based technique, correlates with transcranial Doppler ultrasound measurements in children with sickle cell disease – the standard clinical method to screen stroke risk in these patients. These results suggest that Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy is able monitor brain health at the bedside in this population.

Last month, members of the Buckley Lab attended the 2025 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting, where we were proud to present our work in sickle cell disease research.

Dr. Tara Urner, PhD, presented our latest findings demonstrating that optical measurements of the brain’s hemodynamic response to chronic blood transfusion are associated with cerebral vasculopathy in children with sickle cell anemia. These exciting results highlight the promise of optical biomarkers as a low‑cost tool for early detection and monitoring of vasculopathy development or progression.

Tisha Boodooram presented her research on how the brain changes in patients with sickle cell disease during pain crises, a common and debilitating complication of the disease. Her findings suggest that pain in sickle cell disease is associated with reduced cerebral blood flow and oxygen extraction, which together would be expected to impair oxygen delivery to the brain.

We are grateful to ASH for the opportunity to share our research to this vibrant community.