Research Expertise and Interest
bioengineering, molecular MRI, MRI
Research Description
Moriel Vandsburger is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and the inaugural Timothy and Karen Guertin Endowed Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his lab is on developing molecular MRI techniques for targeted cardiac and cellular imaging.
He completed his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia with a focus on developing MRI methods for assessment of left ventricular remodeling in mice following myocardial infarction (MI). Specifically, his work focused on developing MRI methods to assess myocardial blood flow in the healthy and diseased heart using a technique called arterial spin labeling. In addition, his work focused on elucidating the in vivo roles of nitric oxide synthase isoforms in calcium cycling using manganese-enhanced MRI. He spent ~3 years as a Whitaker International Postdoctoral Scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. There he branched out into MRI reporter gene and cell tracking research, as well as molecular cardiac MRI. At UC Berkeley he has pioneered novel non-invasive diagnostics for molecular characterization of muscle physiology, gene therapy, and degenerative disorders.