Fabio Raman, BS

JAD profile

Affiliation(s): 

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Areas of Interest: 

neuroimaging, PET, biomarkers

Biography & Research: 

Since my childhood, I had passion for technology, design, and developing practical solutions to everyday problems. As an aspiring physician-scientist, my long term goals involve developing a strong foundation in biomedical engineering in order to revolutionize diagnostic neuroimaging tools and better answer scientific questions and improve clinical care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. During my undergraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania under Dr. Meenhard Herlyn, I gained a thorough understanding in fundamental basic science concepts where I studied the mechanisms that facilitated melanoma proliferation and invasion, culminating in my acknowledgement in two major papers in Cell and Oncogene. However, I discovered my imaging passion as I embarked on a 3-year post-baccalaureate research fellowship under NIH Radiology Director, Dr. David Bluemke. Under his mentorship, I first-authored 2 publications and co-authored 5 others. I strengthened my background in translational medicine where I was able to utilize my engineering skills to develop and optimize novel imaging methods to unravel questions in cardiomyopathy and improve the efficiency of medical care. During my second rotation of my pre-doctoral training at UAB, I turned my focus to neuroimaging where I worked under Dr. Hassan-Fathallah-Shaykh to tackle two key gaps in treating patients with glioblastoma (GBM): 1) building an image processing application to better characterize and diagnose GBM and 2) develop a mathematical model to better predict patient outcome by integrating fundamental biology and mathematical concepts. My first goal resulted in winning the international Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) for developing most successful segmentation algorithm. My second goal resulted in my third, first-author paper. Now in my third year of my pre-doctoral training under Drs. Jon McConathy and Erik Roberson, I plan to harness my strong foundation in imaging and biomedical engineering to help pioneer the next frontier in diagnosis for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Through my exemplary physician-scientist mentors, I learned us scientists and engineers not only have to produce exciting science but develop unique, practical solutions to the gaps in patient care. Unfortunately, time and money govern the rules of patient care. Thus, in my choice of sponsor, research project, and training I will get from this fellowship, I will build the foundation to become part of the next-generation leaders in medicine and academia.