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April 4, 2007
CSE and Neuroscience doctoral student James Faghmous said he’s passionate about researching Alzheimer’s disease for two important reasons: his grandmother died as a result of the disease and he’s concerned that it’s becoming a global dilemma due to increased life expectancy in Third World countries. “It robs society of productive individuals,” he said of the incurable disease.
To help advance his research, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Faghmous an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to fund the next three years of his graduate study. Faghmous, who completed his undergraduate degree at City College in Manhattan, N.Y., said he’s humbled to receive the competitive award.
Faghmous describes his interdisciplinary work, known as computational neuroscience, as applying computer science techniques to improve the understanding of neuroscience. For example, he said computer visualization can help medical researchers find abnormalities in brain scans faster and more effectively. He also said computer modeling of affected patient’s brains can help researchers to test hypotheses. Faghmous said his goal is to slow the disease and focus on ways to differentiate between age-related and Alzheimer’s-related dementia.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded his current graduate research through a two-year NIH Computational Neuroscience Fellowship. For the next three years the NSF fellowship will pay $30,000 per year, plus more than $10,000 in educational expenses.
Faghmous is currently looking for an adviser to help supervise his work and said he’s hoping to start his research this summer with an Alzheimer’s research group at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
