Santiago Coelho, PhD

Hi, and welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where I lead a research lab affiliated with the Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R). Before starting my lab, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at CAI2R.

Originally from Argentina, I trained first as an electrical engineer and later pursued a PhD at the University of Leeds at the intersection of biomedical engineering and physics. My postdoctoral work at NYU further deepened my focus on MRI physics, mathematical modeling, and inverse problems. This multidisciplinary training shapes how I approach MRI: as both a physical measurement process and a computational inference problem.

My group develops physics-based and computational methods for quantitative and microstructural MRI. We are particularly interested in diffusion MRI, biophysical tissue modeling, optimal acquisition design, inverse problems, and image reconstruction.

A central theme of my research is understanding how tissue microstructure is encoded in MRI measurements and how that information can be recovered efficiently and robustly. This includes investigating non-standard diffusion encodings, characterizing the rotationally invariant information contained in diffusion signals, designing more informative and clinically feasible acquisitions, and jointly undersampling diffusion-encoding and image spaces to accelerate high-resolution microstructure imaging.

Our long-term goal is to transform MRI into a noninvasive microscope of tissue microstructure and to translate these advances into quantitative imaging tools that are useful in clinical research and, ultimately, patient care.