Assistant Investigator Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Mass General Research Institute

Assistant Professor of Radiology Harvard Medical School

Assistant Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

acupuncture points; acupuncture therapy; complementary therapies; electric impedance; meridians; subcutaneous tissue; systems biology I am a faculty member of both the MGH Martinos Center and the BIDMC Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, as a hospitalist. One-half of my time is dedicated to clinical work while the remaining 50% is spent in clinical research. I also serve as Associate Director of the Laboratory for Dynamical Biomarkers at BIDMC. My research interest is in mathematical, computational analyses of physiological data and in systems approaches to medicine.

As a clinician, I am interested in understanding human health from a holistic, systems-level perspective. This interest spawned my initial research activities in Traditional Chinese Medicine where conceptually the notion of human body as an interconnected system is fundamental to diagnosis and treatment. I became credentialed in acupuncture, completed a Complementary Alternative Medicine Fellowship, finished a five-year NIH K23 career development award focused on mechanisms of acupuncture, and obtained a Master Degree in Public Health.

To pursue a more rigorous, mathematical approach to health, I have taken numerous graduate-level courses in biological engineering at MIT as an Advanced Study Fellow. This has helped advance my research in potential body-wide electrophysiological mechanisms (e.g., collagen piezoelectricity, electrical impedance of connective tissue, and electrical properties of acupuncture points and meridians) and systems-level biomarkers (multi-scale entropy of center-of-pressure and heart rate variability).