Aaryani Tipirneni-Sajja, PhD

Dr. Aaryani Tipirneni-Sajja, is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston. Dr. Sajja is a biomedical scientist with expertise in developing quantitative magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy techniques that will noninvasively identify disease biomarkers, enable early diagnosis and guide response to therapy. Dr. Sajja has secured research funding as a Principal Investigator from National Institute of Health (Trailblazer Award) and National Science Foundation (CAREER Award) and also received several internal and external university grants. She has published 25 journal articles with 1500+ citations, over 45 conference abstracts and 1 book chapter in this field. Dr. Sajja has utmost interests in empowering women and enriching student education in STEM. She has served as K-12 Outreach Chair for SWE (2022, 2023) and organized several STEM activities for K-12 and public. 

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Office: HSB2, Room 8044
PHONE: (901) 678-3772

Utsav Shrestha

Utsav is a PhD student at the University of Memphis studying biomedical engineering. He completed his Masters in Computer Science from the University of Memphis in 2020. He joined MRIS lab in Fall 2019 for pursuing his Masters Thesis. He enjoys programming and aims to aid technical advancement in biomedical field. His research is focused on diagnostic imaging using MRI. His research interests include fat and iron quantification, image processing, simulation, machine learning and deep learning.

Juan Esparza

Juan is a PhD student at the University of Houston. He joined the lab in the spring of 2021 as an undergraduate researcher to work on hepatic steatosis morphological characterization and fat quantification as part of the summer Honors Summer Research Fellowship. He has continued in the lab as a graduate student, completed his MS in Spring of 2024, and is working on correlating sarcopenia and muscle fatty infiltration with frailty in liver cirrhosis using deep learning.

Laila Obadat

Laila Obadat is a MS student studying Biomedical Engineering at the University of Memphis. She is enrolled in the Accelerated Bachelors/Master (ABM) Joint Graduate Program and have got her bachelors degree in the Spring of 2024. She began working in Dr. Sajja’s MRIS lab on various projects in the Summer of 2023 and is currently working on her own research. She is working on NMR-based metabolomics/computational methods to study the influences of dietary lifestyle in the skeletal muscle and other metabolically active tissues. Her interests include studying the physiology of the human body and working on external orthoses for tremor patients.