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Research overview

We are a multidisciplinary research team working to make healthcare more personalized through molecular imaging. Our goal is to develop noninvasive ways to see what's happening inside the body without surgery or biopsy, so that disease can be detected earlier and treatments can be tailored to the individual.

To do this, we design and test imaging biomarkers, measurable signals that reveal biological changes long before symptoms appear or standard scans pick them up. We're especially interested in physiological features of tissue such as pH, tissue oxygen levels, blood vessel function, enzyme activity, and metabolism. These properties shift in informative ways during disease and in response to treatment.

Our work currently focuses on two areas: the tumor microenvironment in cancer and the assessment of changes in the aging brain. We combine ideas and tools from chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology with three imaging methods - magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), and photoacoustic imaging. Together, these approaches let us see not just where disease is, but what it is doing.

Our studies are carried out in preclinical rodent models, with the long-term goal of translating these approaches into the clinic.

MAY 2026: Roshni presented her work at the ISMRM & ISMRT Annual Meeting & Exhibition held in Cape Town, South Africa
MAY 2026: Ananya gave her Ph.D. thesis colloquium presentation (2nd one in MIR lab)!
APRIL 2026: The MIR team along with Dr. Uma Nambiar held the first IMPACT (Imaging of Molecular Pathologies for Advanced Clinical Translation) symposium!
MAR 2026: Sanhita, Pooja, Ananya and Roshni attended and presented their work at the European Molecular Imaging Meeting (EMIM) 2026 held at Ljubljana, Slovenia
MAR 2026: Arjun presented his work in the PMRF symposium held at IIT Guwahati
FEB 2026: Pooja gave her Ph.D. thesis colloquium presentation (1st one in the group)!
FEB 2026: Sanhita gave an invited lecture for the "Cutting-edge lecture series" at ACTREC Mumbai
DEC 2025: Sanhita gave a plenary lecture at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research in Biology (NCURB) organized by IISER Tirupati
NOV 2025: Sanhita gave an invited lecture at Symposium on Interdisciplinary sciences, SIS-II organized by the National Institute of Science Education and Research, NISER, Bhubaneswar
OCT 2025: Arjun attended the Global Scientific Conference organized by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and IIT-Bombay and presented a flash talk
OCT 2025: Sanhita presented the lab's work in an invited talk at the Centre for Nanoscience Engineering (CeNSE) at the Indian Institute of Science
JUL 2025: Sanhita gave an invited talk at ISEI, Indian Photobiology Society, held at JNCASR, India.
JUN 2025: Sanhita, Pooja and Roshni attended and presented at the Asia-Pacific NMR conference (AP-NMR) held in Pune.
MAY 2025: Pooja attended and presented her work at the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, ISMRM 2025, in Honolulu, Hawaii.