Dr. Chiara Maffei, Ph.D., obtained her Master and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Trento in Italy, for which she received the Best Ph.D. thesis award in 2019. Her scientific interests focus on the optimization, validation, and clinical translation of automated diffusion MRI tractography tools for the accurate delineation and quantification of white matter structures in healthy subjects, subjects with depression, and patients with traumatic brain injury. Her postdoctoral work focused on combining anatomical information obtained at different scales (high-resolution ex vivo MRI, optical imaging, and animal tracer data) to validate tractography algorithms and develop novel white matter atlases of the human brain. Her more recent work focuses on using high-resolution dMRI acquired on the MGH Connectome 2.0 scanner to reconstruct very small subcortical pathways in vivo with exceptional anatomical accuracy and replicate results from anatomic tracer in NHPs. She received the Best Research of the Year Award by the IamBrain society and a Young Investigator Award by the Fetal, Infant and Toddler Imaging group. She was recently awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator Award by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation to work on the development of ultra-high-resolution tractography to investigate the small pathways of the sub-cortical depression circuit.
Education
Ph.D. Neuroscience, Trento University, Italy
Select Publications
1. Maffei C, Lee C, Planich M, Ramprasad M, Ravi N, Trainor D, Urban Z, Kim M, Jones RJ, Henin A, Hofmann SG, Pizzagalli DA, Auerbach RP, Gabrieli JDE, Whitfield-Gabrieli S, Greve DN, Haber SN, Yendiki A. Using diffusion MRI data acquired with ultra-high gradient strength to improve tractography in routine-quality data. Neuroimage. 2021 Dec 15;245:118706. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118706. Epub 2021 Nov 12. PMID: 34780916; PMCID: PMC8835483.
2.Maffei C, Girard G, Schilling KG, Aydogan DB, Adluru N, Zhylka A, Wu Y, Mancini M, Hamamci A, Sarica A, Teillac A, Baete SH, Karimi D, Yeh FC, Yildiz ME, Gholipour A, Bihan-Poudec Y, Hiba B, Quattrone A, Quattrone A, Boshkovski T, Stikov N, Yap PT, de Luca A, Pluim J, Leemans A, Prabhakaran V, Bendlin BB, Alexander AL, Landman BA, Canales-Rodríguez EJ, Barakovic M, Rafael-Patino J, Yu T, Rensonnet G, Schiavi S, Daducci A, Pizzolato M, Fischi-Gomez E, Thiran JP, Dai G, Grisot G, Lazovski N, Puch S, Ramos M, Rodrigues P, Prčkovska V, Jones R, Lehman J, Haber SN, Yendiki A. Insights from the IronTract challenge: Optimal methods for mapping brain pathways from multi-shell diffusion MRI. Neuroimage. 2022 Aug 15;257:119327. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119327. Epub 2022 May 26. PMID: 35636227; PMCID: PMC9453851.
3.Maffei C, Gilmore N, Snider SB, Foulkes AS, Bodien YG, Yendiki A, Edlow BL. Automated detection of axonal damage along white matter tracts in acute severe traumatic brain injury. Neuroimage Clin. 2023;37:103294. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2022.103294. Epub 2022 Dec 13. PMID: 36529035; PMCID: PMC9792957.
Highlights
2022 Best Research of the Year Award IamBrain 2022 Annual Meeting “Submillimiter dMRI protocol optimization for accurate in-vivo reconstruction of deep-brain circuitry.”
2023 Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator NARSAD Award https://bbrfoundation.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023-yi-booklet_1.pdf
2024 Invited OHBM Oral Presentation “Multi-modal, multi-scale imaging shows that long-association systems are made of short relay fibers”
Associated Labs
Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness (NICC)
Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging (LCN)
Associated Lab(s) Sites
https://lcn.martinos.org; https://www.comarecoverylab.org