Faculty:
Dr. Songbai Ji
Professor
Biomedical Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Student Openings:
We are looking for motivated graduate students to joint our team! If you are interested in designing experimental hardware for testing, computational modeling, or medical image analysis, we would be interested in your contacting us. To be successful in graduate school admission and joining our lab, you will need a minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.0. Often, 3.5 and above is desired. For international students, TOEFL scores often will need to be above 100. If you meet these requirement, and most importantly, are passionate about our research work, send along your CV. We look forward to hearing from you.
We are also interested in undergraduate interns working in the lab — at this time, on football concussion studies. You will have the opportunity to interact with athletes, athletic trainers, coaches, and other investigators in the medical school.
PhD Graduate Students:
Shaoju Wu
Shaoju Wu (swu3@wpi.edu) is a PhD student in the biomedical engineering department at WPI. He works with Prof. Ji’s lab members to analyze problems in traumatic brain injury (TBI), by applying machine learning and computer vision techniques to multi-modality brain images. Before joining WPI, he earned a master’s degree from the University of Florida in 2017 with a concentration on medical image processing in pathology and microscopic images.
Shaoju won the inaugural Sotak Research Award among all PhD graduates in the BME department in 2021.
Chaokai Zhang
Chaokai Zhang is currently a PhD student in the biomedical engineering department at WPI. Working in Prof. Ji’s lab, his current work focuses on whole-brain multiscale modeling of concussion. His major research interests are in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and machine learning. Before joining WPI, he graduated from the University of Virginia with an M.Eng. focusing on Computer simulations of soft-hard materials and Football Helmet Optimization.
Nan Lin
Nan Lin is a PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at WPI. Her research interests are finite element modeling and deep learning. Her current research at the Jilab focuses on deep learning models of the brain models. Before joininng WPI, she earned her Master of Science degree at Marquette University with a focus on lumbar spine reaction during high-speed vehicle crash.
Kianoosh Ghazi
Kianoosh Ghazi was a previous PhD student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Working with Professor Songbai Ji, his work is primarily focused on computational Traumatic Brain Injury modeling, which involves complex programming. A majority of this is conducted through MATLAB. Previously, he graduated from Sharif University of Technology with a B.Sc. while focusing on Computer simulations of solid structures using Finite Element Method (FEM).
Dr. Ghazi earned his PhD degree in the summer of 2021. Currently, he works as a machine learning engineer at hireEZ.
Undergraduate Students:
Seungjoon Lee
Seungjoon Lee is currently an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), double majoring in Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering. His academic interest is in bio-instrumentation and biosensor. Working in Prof. Ji’s lab as a lab volunteer, his work is focused on coding MATLAB to organize NHTSA and IIHS vehicle crash test databases, and running software, such as SIMON, for simulation about vehicle crash tests. In addition, he helps coordinate with football athletes, athletic trainers, coaches, and investigators at the UMASS Medical School for on-field concussion studies.
Armando Jose Zubillaga
Armando is currently an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), majoring in Biomedical Engineering. He spends the summer as a volunteer working on impact data collection and modeling in the lab.
Paul Bonarrigo
Paul is currently an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), majoring in Biomedical Engineering. He works as a volunteer to coordinate with football athletes, athletic trainers, coaches, and investigators at the UMASS Medical School for on-field concussion studies.
Kayla Krom
Kayla is an undergraduate student at WPI. She works as a volunteer to coordinate with football athletes, athletic trainers, coaches, and investigators at the UMASS Medical School for on-field concussion studies.
Millard, Tzu Fei
Emily is an undergraduate student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, majoring in Biomedical Engineering. She spends her summer working as an REU student in the lab.
Lab Alumni:
Dr. Wei Zhao
Dr. Zhao joined the Jilab since 2013 after he earned his Ph.D. degree from Tianjin University of Science and Technology. His post-doctoral work focused on mild traumatic brain injury in contact sports based on computational modeling. His research interests also include neuroimaging, pediatric brain injury, machine learning, human body modeling, vehicle accident engineering, and traffic accident reconstruction. Outside the lab Wei enjoys soccer, music, cooking, and eating.
Dr. Zhao joined the industry in 2021, and currently works as a senior data scientist at HealthCare.com
Dr. Yunliang Cai
Dr. Cai’s research focused on applying advanced machine learning methods to traumatic brain injury problems. He also worked on patient registration methods for image-guided spinal surgery. Before joining WPI, he received his Ph.D in computer science from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and later, became a postdoc fellow in medical image analysis at the Western University in Ontario, Canada and then a postdoc research associate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, United States.
Dr. Cai is currently a lead data scientist at Humana.
Bryan P. Choate: Manager of Fader Innovation Center at McDonogh School
Bei Li: Research engineer at Autoliv