A Summer of Research as an Amgen Scholar at the University of Cambridge

In the summer of 2010, I was selected for the Amgen Scholars Programme—which saw a highly competitive 6% acceptance rate that year—to conduct fully funded biomedical research at the University of Cambridge.

I joined the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre and worked with Adrian Carpenter and Steve Sawiak. My research focused on computational neuroimaging. Specifically, we evaluated the fundamental detection limits of automated voxel-based morphometry (VBM) for mapping subtle structural alterations in rodent brains using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

By leveraging simulated 3D phantom images alongside controlled morphometric modifications, our framework systematically analyzed how critical experimental variables—such as Gaussian smoothing kernels, effect sizes, spatial extents, and sample sizes—influenced the sensitivity and statistical power of voxel-wise inference. This methodological contribution helps optimize experimental design pipelines for identifying neuroanatomical biomarkers in rodent models of neurological disease.

The summer culminated in a poster presentation titled “Detection limits of automated MRI morphometry for phenotyping in the rodent brains for applications in neurological disorders” at the Amgen Scholars European Symposium 2010, hosted at Cambridge.

Read more about the project: Detection Limits of Automated MRI Morphometry in Rodent Brains