Tracy Butler Laboratory

Dr. Tracy Butler is a neurologist/neuroscientist with clinical subspecialty training in behavioral neurology and epilepsy and research fellowship training in functional and structural neuroimaging.  She is the medical director of the Brain Health Imaging Institute (BHII) where she oversees subject assessment and clinical trials of therapies and neuroimage biomarkers of aging and neurodegeneration.  Her research uses multimodal positron emission tomorgraphy (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) neuroimaging and complementary methods to better understand the biological basis of neuropsychiatric disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and as normal aging, focusing on pathophysiologic overlap among these conditions such as hormonal dysregulation, neuroinflammation and brain toxic protein (tau and amyloid) accumulation.

Tom Maloney is a highly experienced project and data manager for complex clinical research studies of brain function.  He has deep expertise in developing database structures and tools and facilities for smooth, flexible capture, organization and retrieval of very large, very dense, highly diverse study data from multiple research and clinical domains. His background ranges from event-related electroencephalogram (EEG) potentials, sleep regulation, cognitive performance, chronobiology and neuropsychological testing to functional neuroimaging.  He has planned and managed research and clinical operations and data migrations at Stony Brook University, the Veterans Administration, University of California, Brown University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and, since 2019, Weill Cornell Medicine.  He is project manager for the LUCINDA Trial and Data Manager for the Brain Health Imaging Institute. 

Xiuyuan (Hugh) Wang has been working with Dr. Butler since 2011, first at New York University and now at Weill Cornell.  He received his bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering from Shanghai University, and a master's degree from City College of New York. He is an image analyst in the lab working on biomedical signal and image processing. 

Carly Skudin is the Research Program Manager of the MRI Research Institute. She works closely with Dr. Yi Wang and other MRIRI investigators to monitor ongoing research projects; oversee statistical and data management operations; provide leadership during the research grant process; execute grant writing, scientific publication, and regulatory reviews; and manage the appointments of the lab's faculty and students. Skudin graduated from Colgate University with a degree in neuroscience.

Ilker Ozsahin is a postdoctoral associate in the Tracy Butler lab working on positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analyses for several diseases including Alzheimer’s disease. He has worked in several different physics areas such as high energy physics, solid-state physics, and medical imaging. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked on growth of carbon nanotubes. He received his Ph.D. in medical imaging in Turkey. He has extensive experience with medical imaging devices such as PET, Positron Emission Mammography (PEM), Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), and Compton Camera (CC), including modelling, simulation, characterization, and image reconstruction. He worked at Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain as a Ph.D. student. In addition to his Ph.D. studies, he worked as a research assistant for six years in the physics department at Cukurova University in Adana, Turkey. After earning his Ph.D., he spent two years at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as a postdoctoral fellow. He worked on the simulation of a high-performance PET scanner for small animal and breast imaging, and investigated the mechanism of general anesthesia. He served as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Macau looking into multi-pinhole SPECT collimator design and implementation for brain imaging, as well as cardiac and small animal imaging via adaptive collimators. He is investigating neural network applications for neurological diseases and operational research in healthcare.