During high school, I was really passionate about studying biology and medicine, but as I got closer to making a decision about what I would like to study in college, it was very clear to me that the mere thought of cutting things and the sight of blood scared me..so that was definitely not an option! I then studied Electrical Engineering for my undergraduate and graduate degree. But during my first semester, we had this really interesting course on applications of imaging, and that's where I came across medical imaging! I then a did an internship in Radiology to gain some research experience. Following that, I was convinced that that was what I wanted to do my doctoral research on and my thesis was based on developing better techniques to objectively diagnose depression.

I think the really cool thing about medical imaging is that as an engineer with absolutely no medical background, I still get to utilize those skills to develop better techniques and algorithms to address important medical questions. Specifically in neuroimaging, where is there is so little understood about the brain, it's really neat that I can stay VERY far away from cutting into one but still study things like depression and aging merely by analyzing brain images!