Earlier this month (2/2-2/9), the Buckley Lab attended the 2019 SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Francisco. The conference helped us stay up to date with all of the current optics research that our colleagues are involved in, and we were grateful for the opportunities to present our work.

Dr. Buckley gave a talk summarizing our most recent work published in the Neurobiology of Disease journal on possible mechanistic links between cerebral blood flow and neuroinflammation after repetitive mild traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Paul Lee talked about how we have demonstrated the feasibility of a low-cost, noninvasive diffuse correlation spectroscopy to quantify microvascular cerebral blood flow in children with sickle cell disease.

Our grad student, Eashani, talked about the accuracy, validity, and repeatability of using small separation DCS to measure cerebral blood flow in mouse models, which was also the subject of her recently published paper.

We learned a lot alongside our colleagues, and we can’t wait for next year’s conference!

Congratulations to our postdoc, Dr. Paul Lee, for receiving a 2019 American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship! His project, entitled “Optical Measurements of Microvascular Cerebral Blood Flow in Children with Sickle Cell Disease” will validate Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS) measurements of microvascular cerebral blood flow in patients with sickle cell disease, and it will use DCS to characterize cerebrovascular hemodynamics in this unique patient population. Here is a picture of Paul after finding out that his hard work has paid off!

In May, Drs. Buckley and Wood were awarded a Co-PI Peer Reviewed Alzheimer’s Research Program grant from the Department of Defense to 1) investigate acute hemodynamic and metabolic biomarkers of long-term pathological changes (i.e., amyloid beta and tau tangles) after repetitive sports-related head injury, and 2) understand inflammatory mechanisms driving changes in these acute biomarkers. Promising biomarkers found in this proposal can be readily translated to controlled clinical studies, as many of the parameters we are studying can be quantified non-invasively in the emergency room, battlefield, or sideline setting. Further, successful drug treatments found in our mechanistic evaluation could represent easily translatable therapies to test in patient studies, as some of the drugs we are testing are already approved for clinical use by the FDA.