Alejandra Sierra
University of Eastern Finland
Alejandra Sierra completed her doctoral degree in Biochemistry at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain in 2006. The topic of her doctoral thesis was the analysis of glutamate and glutamine exchange between the cytosol and the mitochondria in neurons and astrocytes in vitro and in vivo, using (13C, 2H) NMR spectroscopy. After her PhD, she stablished herself in Kuopio, Finland, where she is now a research director in the A.I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Sciences and leads the Multiscale Imaging Group. She is one of the leading experts in characterization and validation of MRI. Over the past 15 years, she has developed multidisciplinary research in the interface of neuroscience, physic, mathematics, and computational sciences. Her team performs in vivo and ex vivo MRI experiments on animal models of disease and histology on the same animals, and also, in human studies. She is interested in cutting-edge and emerging MRI methodology, such as multidimensional MRI and 3D microscopic techniques, such as confocal and 3D-eletron microscopy. Knowing what the signal means in terms of tissue properties, MRI can improve its detection of brain alterations and, in turn, that information can push forward MRI development. In FAME’s context, Dr Sierra seeks to develop solutions for characterizing the MRI voxel in terms of microstructure and mathematical quantitative tools to extract tissue metrics and predictive methods for a better correlation with MRI techniques.