Postdoc Feature
So Young Choi, Ph.D.
So Young is a postdoc in the Institute of Imaging Science program within the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where her current research focuses on the examination of the contribution of white matter neural activity to brain activity as captured by the BOLD imaging technique in humans. Her aim is to decompose macro-scale metabolic signals that are captured by fMRI and then explore the relationship between structural and functional connectivity. So Young has been passionate about the brain, the nervous system, and it's functioning since her childhood when her father would run acupuncture clinic out of their home. As he treated patients, he would explain the inter-workings of the nervous system to So Young, sparking a lifelong interest in the subject. Prior to her postdoctoral role here at Vanderbilt, So Young completed both her B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Southern California where she was first introduced to neuro-imaging under the guidance of her previous mentor, Dr. Hanna Damasio. During her Ph.D. studies, So Young learned about neuroanatomy, examining the secondary effects of anterior temporal lesions and contributed in the development of a multimodal neuro-imaging preprocessing and analysis toolbox called 'BrainSuite' as well as a hybrid high-resolution anatomical and functional human brain atlas.