Faculty

Dr. Hyder is Professor of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, where he is a founding faculty member. He is Head of MRS Group of the MRRC and Director of QNMR Research Program. He studied physical chemistry at Wabash College (BA 1990) and biophysical chemistry at Yale University (PhD 1995). Dr. Hyder studies brain energy metabolism. His lab develops magnetic resonance (MR) based imaging methods to study brain physiology and chemistry, revealing how neuronal-glial cells fuel their function and (re)growth. He posits that mapping metabolic dysfunction (e.g., energetics for cellular function vs. cellular proliferation) can indicate early biomarkers of brain disorders and diseases. To map brain’s physiology and chemistry with MR-based imaging and spectroscopic advances and targeted delivery and monitoring of treatments, his laboratory conducts multidisciplinary functional and molecular imaging of neurodegeneration and neuro-oncology, requiring expertise in physics to chemistry to engineering to cancer biology to neuroscience. His contributions include development of high-resolution fMRI in preclinical models, calibrated fMRI for quantitative imaging of neuronal activity, and molecular imaging methods for pH and temperature mapping and other physiological parameters that are relevant in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Hyder has written and edited books on functional brain imaging and holds several patents on molecular imaging of cancer. His research work has produced over 240 papers with as many invited presentations, amassing over 20K citations. He has had continuous NIH support for 25 years, spanning across interests from 7 different NIH institutes. He has renewed grants from different funding agencies and has received several early career awards from. He sits on editorial boards of several scientific journals, and he reviews for many scientific journals spanning several disciplines. He serves on advisory panels of several funding agencies. Dr. Hyder holds many honors, including the Melvin H. Knisely Award from the International Society on Oxygen Transport to Tissue, the Niels Lassen Award from the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, and the Lundbeck Foundation Visiting Professorship at the University of Copenhagen. He has fellowships in American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Academy of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research, and Sigma Xi the Scientific Research Honor Society. Recently, he was appointed Head of Trumbull College at Yale University and received a General Assembly Official Citation from the State of Connecticut.

Dr. Yuguo Yu is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology and MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, Research Institute of Intelligent Complex Systems at Fudan University. Dr. Yu obtained Ph.D (2001) in Physics at Nanjing University. Dr. Yu was trained in computational/Behavior Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University as a Postdoct from 2001 to 2004; and Associate Research Scientist at Department of Neuroscience at Yale University (2005-2011). He was awarded with the Shanghai Eastern Scholar Professorship (2013), Eastern Scholar Tracking Distinguished Professorship (2017), and Shanghai outstanding academic leaders plan (2021). He is a member of the Chinese Society of Computational Neuroscience.  Research interest: Energy Efficient Neural Coding and Decoding, Brain Energetics, Large Scale Spiking Neural Network.