Brain Injury & Neuroscience

Biography

Lucia-Maria Vaina combines psychophysics, multimodal neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG), and computational modeling to study plasticity and the spatiotemporal orchestration of the visually eloquent system in humans. She trained first in mathematics&applied mathematics, and received her first PhD from the Sorbonne, in 1977, she underwent postdoctoral training at Berkeley (with Lotfi Zadeh) , Stanford (with Patrick Suppes) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (with Marvin Minsky), before getting her MDPhD at the University of Toulouse, and training in neurology at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston under Norman Geshwind and at the Boston VA under Harold Goodglass. Dr. Vaina is currently Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at Boston University and on the faculty faculty at Harvard Medical School, Departments of Neurology&Radiology. She is Director of Brain and Vision Laboratory (BRAVI) (http://www.bu.edu/bravi/) at Boston University and co-director of the Neurology of Vision Laboratory (NOVI) at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard medical School.She worked at New England Rehabilitation Hospital, Young Stroke Unit and Brain Injury Unit , until 1997 when she moved to Massachusetts General Hospital-Neurology Department & Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She has served as expert witness defending Brain Injury patients with acquired cognitive and perceptual deficits.

Research Interest

Dr. Vaina main areas of current interest involve: (a) models of visual motion analysis in the human brain based on computational, psychophysical, structural and functional-neuroanatomical methods; (b) functional plasticity-learning and neurocovery: physchophysics, functional neuroimaging and neuronal network models; (c) Functional MRI of the human visual system.