People

Sarah is a PhD student in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program at Harvard/MIT. She obtained her MPhil in Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge (2025), where she studied MR techniques for Deuterium Metabolic Imaging under Dr. Chris Rodgers, supported by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned her BA in physics and biology from Colgate University (2024), where she conducted research on the synchronization dynamics of Josephson Junction neurons under Dr. Ken Segall. Her research in the Lewis Lab investigates the impact of endocrine transitions across the female lifespan on cerebrovascular health and glymphatic clearance mechanisms. Outside of research she enjoys running, lacrosse and yoga.

Alejandra recently graduated from Brown University with a double major in Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience. She completed her undergraduate honors thesis on the development of hormone-responsive endometrial organoids. She previously interned at the Lewis Lab under MIT's Summer Research Program (MSRP), where she investigated sex differences in cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics during aging. Ale also interned at the MIT Media Lab, where she worked on ultrasound-responsive wearable devices for women's health. Overall, she is deeply passionate about women's health and neuroscience and is interested in exploring this intersection further. As a Clinical Research Coordinator, Ale seeks to deepen her proficiency in neuroimaging techniques to study coupled neural dynamics and brain connectivity in relation to sleep, neurodegeneration, and women's health, and to gain experience working with human subjects on the lab's projects.

Kyra is currently a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2025 with both a BS and MSE in Biomedical Engineering. Her previous work includes studying alternative exon splicing in neurodegenerative conditions and brain network modeling to analyze the interaction between cognitive effort and early seizure termination. Kyra’s current research interests include multimodal neuroimaging with a focus on brain energetics and neural mechanisms sustaining attention and cognitive performance under resource-constrained conditions.

Amelia is a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. After receiving her B.S. in Biopsychology from UC Santa Barbara, she worked as a research assistant processing and analyzing PET data for clinical dementia research at UC San Francisco. Her current research is focused on quantifying brain tissue motion and its relationship to cerebrospinal fluid flow using motion-encoded MRI. She is co-advised by Dr. Jonathan Polimeni at Stanford University.

Erin is an MEng student in the Department of EECS. She received her BS from MIT with a double major in Artificial Intelligence & Decision Making and Brain & Cognitive Science. She is interested in machine learning applications to neuroscience. Her projects with the Lewis Lab include applying machine learning to fMRI data to automatically segment cerebrospinal fluid inflow signal, and to predict arousal state transitions in the ascending arousal network.

Merel has a background in Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience and Dementia studies. She earned her Ph.D. at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where she applied high-field MRI to study the brain’s waste clearance system in relation to Alzheimer’s disease. At MIT, in the Lewis Lab, she now investigates this system during wakefulness and sleep using EEG and diffusion MRI. Her work is supported by the Dutch Alzheimer Society (Alzheimer Nederland).

Dragana has a background in biomedical engineering and cognitive neuroscience. She completed her PhD at the Paris Brain Institute, where she used multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning to investigate states and disorders of consciousness, followed by a postdoctoral position studying local sleep-like activity during sleep deprivation. At MIT, in the Lewis Lab, she studies sleep-wake regulation in humans using multimodal neuroimaging (high-field fMRI, EEG, physiological signals) combined with novel AI methods. She is supported by the MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence postdoctoral fellows program.

Trang is a Ph.D. student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program at MIT. She received her B.A. in Biochemistry and Math from Mount Holyoke College, where she worked on research related to protein misfolding in neurodegenerative diseases. After graduation, she worked as a research assistant studying dendritic contributions to cortical computations in mice and humans. Her current interests include aging, neuromodulation, and brain-body interactions.

Adiya earned a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh, where she investigated how inhibitory neurons influence network activity and regulate cerebral blood flow. Using multiphoton and optical imaging techniques alongside EEG recordings in mice, she examined brain activity while selectively manipulating neuronal subpopulations with optogenetics and chemogenetics. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Lewis Lab, Adiya aims to integrate fNIRS and fMRI to explore how neuromodulatory nuclei shape neurovascular coupling in the cortex and across the brain.

Aaron is a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program at MIT. He obtained B.S. from University of California, San Diego in 2020 with in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also received M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2023 before coming to Boston. Aaron's past experiences span both hardware and computational research for neuroscience. He previously worked with Dr. Maysam Chamanzar at CMU to create automated propagation loss characterization system for optical neural probes. Afterwards, he worked with Dr. Michele Insanally at University of Pittsburgh to study the synaptic origin of behavioral flexibility through spiking RNN models. Aaron aims to combine both hardware and software research to improve neuromodulation in humans, and he is currently working on refining stimulation algorithm for slow wave sleep.

Gabby is a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program at MIT. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2024 with B.S. from the Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science Departments, as well as an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering. Previously, she worked with Dr. Adam Charles in the Neural Signals and Computation Lab at JHU, where she worked with evaluating and improving spike deconvolution algorithms for calcium neural signal imaging. Gabby’s research interest is in using computational techniques to extract biological relevance from neuroimages, and she is currently investigating the predictability of CSF flow from EEG.

Danlei received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Northeastern University focusing on the functional involvement of the human brainstem in cognition using ultra-high field fMRI. Her general interest is in investigating whole-brain neural dynamics that regulate the autonomic systems over time, especially during different levels of arousal. Currently, she uses fast, high-resolution neuroimaging, measures in both central and peripheral physiology, and computational approaches to explore the relationship between changes in BOLD signals, cerebrospinal fluid flow, and peripheral physiological patterns across a spectrum of arousal states.