Research Vision
In neurological disease, dysfunction begins at a scale invisible to standard clinical scans. The structures that degenerate earliest — cortical layers, hippocampal subfields, thalamic and brainstem nuclei — sit precisely below the resolving power of clinical MRI, meaning disease is often already advanced by the time imaging can reliably detect it. Closing that gap requires precision imaging — tailoring the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of advanced MRI at 3 and 7 T to the specific imaging phenotype of each patient, and building the quantitative understanding needed to guide individual therapy and intervention.
My approach is not simply to push resolution higher but to acquire the right contrast, at the right resolution, for the right structure and disease, treating acquisition, analysis, and biological interpretation as a single integrated workflow rather than as separate technical problems. Better imaging enables better questions, and better questions are what translate, eventually, into better outcomes for patients.
This philosophy underpins three interconnected research lines:
- building clinically robust quantitative MR acquisition and analysis methods
- grounding imaging findings in cellular and molecular biology through multi-scale data integration
- developing layer-sensitive MRI at 7 T to test whether mesoscale resolution yields more specific and earlier biomarkers for diseases with known layer-dependent pathology
Together, they form a pipeline from methods to mechanisms, producing imaging tools that are biologically interpretable and robust enough for clinical collaborators to adopt into patient care.
Background & Training
I am an interdisciplinary neuroscientist with over 12 years of ultra-high-field (7 T) MRI experience and a background spanning biomedical engineering, MR physics, neurophysiology, and cognitive and clinical neurosciences. I obtained my PhD in ultra-high-field neuroimaging from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. My doctoral work focused on developing novel high-resolution BOLD and non-BOLD functional MRI acquisition and analysis methods to uncover layer-specific activation profiles at 7 T, including the highest spatial resolution fMRI of the human visual cortex to date (0.1 mm laminar resolution, Kashyap et al., 2018) and the characterisation of layer-specific activation profiles using sub-millimetric resolution perfusion-weighted functional MRI (Kashyap et al., 2021).
My post-doctoral work extended these methods into quantitative multimodal UHF applications. As co-first and corresponding author, I led a multimodal 7 T study combining high-resolution ASL, MP2RAGE, and 3D-TOF angiography to produce the first non-invasive perfusion maps of hippocampal subfields in vivo (Haast & Kashyap et al., 2024). As senior author, I led a systematic investigation of the human nucleus basalis of Meynert (Wang et al., 2022), a key cholinergic nucleus whose degeneration is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Beyond my immediate research group, I established independent collaborations in high-resolution 7 T clinical imaging characterising resting-state functional connectivity (Serrarens & Kashyap et al., 2023), intracortical myelin (Serrarens et al., 2024), and white matter organisation (Serrarens et al., 2024). Throughout, I have built open-source tools such as presurfer to make image processing of ultra-high-field MRI data accessible beyond my immediate group. In 2024, I was elected a Junior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM).
Current Research
Working closely with neurologists, neuroradiologists, and neurosurgeons at Toronto Western and Sunnybrook Hospitals, I serve as co-PI on three ongoing multi-year clinical MRI studies spanning neuromodulation, movement disorders, and neurodegeneration. As part of this programme, I developed a high-resolution multimodal movement disorders protocol improving MRgFUS and DBS target visualisation at the individual patient level, and led the development of automated DBS electrode localisation and segmentation methods (Yu et al., 2026), enabling precise patient-specific mapping of active stimulation sites. I also led the development of the BRAIN-TO protocols at 3 T, adopted across more than 16 Toronto labs and used internationally, and recently extended these to 7 T (Accepted, OHBM 2026).
Outside the Lab
I enjoy natural history, epic fantasy and graphic novels, I actively follow soccer football (you PL Champions 25/26 - The Arsenal!), I’m an avid gamer (PC, PS5 & tabletop), I tinker with my Raspberry Pi and other gadgets, and love to travel when I can afford to.
Search for Sriranga Kashyap's papers on the Publications page