Bharat has been with the Buckley Lab for the past 2 years, and he has been essential in keeping the lab running, with all the work he has done as lab manager. But sadly, today was his last day in lab, so we had a farewell lunch for him at Sotolero. He was accepted at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta! He will be leaving to go travel around the world for a month before he starts medical school in the fall. We’re sad because he’s leaving us, but happy that he is following his dreams. We will definitely miss him, but best of luck, future Dr. Sanders. You’ll make a great physician!

On a brighter note, Peter Lee is coming back to our lab after finishing up his freshman year at Georgia Tech. He will be working full time this summer. Welcome back, Peter!

Our lab has had a great year, so we celebrated the end of the spring semester at Leon’s Full Service in downtown Decatur. In addition to Dr. Buckley receiving news that her new grant will be funded, we also celebrated two of our lab members- Michelle and Amanda, graduating from Georgia Tech!

Michelle will be leaving our lab to move to Arizona to start at WL Gore as a new product development engineer- we’ll miss you, Michelle!
Amanda will be starting graduate school at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health in the fall, and she is now our new lab manager, so she’ll be here for a while 🙂
We’ll also miss Corey, who will be leaving our lab to focus on finishing up his senior year at Georgia Tech- moving onto bigger and better things!

We got a lot done this past year, but we’re definitely looking forward to getting some new projects started up this summer. Stay tuned to see all the exciting changes that will be happening in our lab in the near future!

At the beginning of this month (4/3-4/6) the Buckley Lab attended the OSA: Optics and the Brain Conference in Florida. This conference was great in keeping us up to date with existing and emerging techniques on the healthy and diseased brain. We were fortunate that we were able to present our lab’s research with posters and talks.

Dr. Buckley gave a talk on the advancements that our lab has been making to elucidate the mechanisms of brain injury. Specifically, using non-invasive DCS (diffuse correlation spectroscopy) measurements, we discovered that low cerebral blood flow is a functional biomarker of cognitive and pathological outcome after repetitive head injury. Kyle also gave a poster presentation on how cerebral blood flow acts as a neuroinflammation biomarker in response to head injuries.
Eashani gave a talk on translating DCS to a preclinical mouse model and the process of validating the accuracy of our measurements.
Paul presented a poster on a Monte-Carlo simulation based inverse algorithm to estimate absorption and scattering properties using small separation (<1cm) frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy data. He got a great audience!