Author: Ranganatha Sitaram

Dr. Sitaram is a Full Professor in the Diagnostic Imaging Department at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Director of Multimodal Functional Brain Imaging and Neurorehabilitation. Dr. Sitaram is a researcher in the interdisciplinary areas of cognitive neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and computational intelligence. Dr. Sitaram has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from India and a PhD in neuroscience Summa Cum Laude from the Karls-Erberhard University of Tubingen (Germany). Dr. Sitaram has vast international experience: After completing his post-doctoral research stints at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics, Dr. Sitaram worked in several faculty positions, including at the University of Tubingen, the University of Florida in Gainesville (USA), the Pontificia Universidad in Santiago (Chile), and visiting professorships at the Wyss Center for Neuro & Bio Engineering in Geneva (Switzerland) and the Sri Chitra Tirunal Institute of Biomedical Sciences (India). Before these positions, Dr. Sitaram worked for 12 years in Singapore, in various scientific leadership roles at the Information Technology Institute, the Institute for Infocomm Research, and the Kent Ridge Digital Labs, on several topics, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, distributed software architectures, and Neuroinformatics. Dr. Sitaram has authored 75 scientific and technical articles, 15 international patents, and two edited books. Dr. Sitaram has received the following awards: the Indian Prime Minister´s Special Award called Vajra for Visiting Professorship in Neuroscience, the BrainChile Prize for Neurorehab Technologies, a technology spinoff company, the Best Research Award: ¨Neural mechanism of brain self-regulation¨, the International Conference on Real-time Functional Imaging and Neurofeedback, the Indian President’s Award of Visiting Professorship in Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, and the Infocomm Development Authority (Singapore) Award for the development of a suite of products and services based on intelligent wireless technology. Dr. Sitaram’s work is focused on developing novel scientific techniques for modulating brain activity in selected brain regions and networks to bring about specific changes in sensation, perception, cognition, and action in health and disease. His research combined innovative developments in functional and structural brain imaging, physiological measurement technology, and computational algorithms. His research program at St. Jude would integrate multimodal functional brain imaging with experimental and computational neuroscience techniques to understand and characterize adverse changes in brain function and network dynamics due to pediatric cancer and its treatment and to innovate novel techniques of neurorehabilitation to mitigate the effects.