Tatiana Wolfe, Ph.D., is a tenure track assistant professor and medical imaging physicist within our group. Dr Wolfe’s research is concerned with understanding how brain myelination in late life arbitrates cognitive flexibility –an important psychiatric risk factor. Using advanced MRI modalities, Dr Wolfe investigates the integrity of brain neuro circuitry involved in processing human abilities of inhibition and switching, and how disruptions of these brain networks are related to vulnerability to psychiatric and neurological pathology.
Background: Dr Wolfe received her bachelor’s and her doctorate in medical physics from the Department of Physics of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, where she has trained extensively in computational modeling of radiation transport using Monte Carlo simulations, soft matter interactions, molecular, biophysical and physiological processes. She has completed an undergraduate fellowship at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center between 2012-2013 in investigating cellular effects of radiation interaction with internalized gold nanoparticles. She continued to be a postdoctoral fellow for the two following years in the same department working with preclinical experimental radiation oncology and ultra-high field cancer MRI. In 2015, she joined the Horner Lab in the Center for Neuroregeneration at the Houston Methodist Hospital and Research Institute in Texas, to expand the work in developing a new MRI technology for imaging myelination changes in brain and spinal cord in vivo. She is author of two U.S. patents and two new disclosures under filling, both related to neuroregenerative electrical stimulation intervention (“nSIM devices and methods thereof”; “Intracavitary physiological feedback loop vagal stimulation for stroke control”), and noninvasivemyelin MRI measurements (“Myelin Signal Isolation MRI”;“SHIFT Echo MRI”). She has served as medical imaging physicist research scientist in the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging and at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital at the Ohio State University until 2021.
Current: In March 2022, she joined the Department of Psychiatry in the UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute to spearhead the LIFE Brain project designed to study Late-life Imaging Features of the Brain and its associations to risk for psychiatric conditions. Dr Wolfe has established diverse collaborations to extend the application of advanced MRI to Neurosurgical planning, as well as to clinical research involving individuals with multiple sclerosis and breast cancer survivors who suffer from cognitive decline, and beyond, while working in the interdisciplinary boundaries of physics and medicine.