About

Dr. Uzay E. Emir is an Associate Professor in the UNC Department of Radiology with a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He received a PhD from Bogazici University, Turkey. His research interests include studying the neurochemical basis of brain plasticity, developing methods for profiling psychiatric disorders and psychoactive drug discovery, neurochemical profiling of brain cancer, and unraveling the neurochemical mechanism of BOLD-fMRI signal.

Having completed his Ph.D., in which he studied BOLD fMRI signal transients with different imaging modalities, he broadened his scientific expertise further by undertaking postdoctoral training in the related but distinct field of MRS methods. He sought to utilize MR imaging and MR spectroscopy (MRS) to identify biomarkers for various types of neurodegenerative diseases. During his postdoctoral training at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, he developed advanced 3 and 7 Tesla MRS sequences recommended by the Experts’ Working Group on Advanced Single Voxel MRS. Dr. Emir undertook the first studies to quantify neurochemical profiles from various brain regions at 7T, focusing on metabolites of interest in neurological disorders. He also applied those methods to the preclinical scanner to detect neurochemical changes before overt pathology in a mouse model of spinocerebellar ataxia type 1. During his role as the Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford and Assistant Professor at Purdue University, his efforts resulted in many advancements in the field of the MRI and MRSI, such as developing density-weighted concentric ring trajectory, a novel ultra-short echo time 3D Rosette MRI and MRSI technique.