User:Jose.Marques

I was educated as an experimental physicist at the University of Coimbra (Portugal).

My desire to learn more about the about the fascinating field of MRI took me to the United Kingdom to pursue my PhD at the University of Nottingham, where I worked at the laboratory of Sir Peter Mansfield under the supervision of Richard Bowtell. Working on theoretical aspects of NMR (Long Range Dipolar Fields) in an applied group allowed me to bring new physical insights and methods to concrete problems: understanding the impact of BOLD mechanisms in MR signal using realistic vasculature models and proposing a fast mathematical framework to describe static field perturbations that would lead to the field of Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping.

I subsequently took a postdoctoral position back in my hometown University of Coimbra, where I developed new data driven methods to process EEG-fMRI data in epilepsy.

My desire to return to spin physics, then took me to one of the most well equipped high field MRI laboratories (7T human and 14T animal scanners) in Europe at the time, the CIBM (BioMedical Imaging Centre) at the University of Lausanne & EPFL, where I worked for 8 years in the institute led by Prof. Gruetter. During my time at the CIBM, I consolidated as a scientist that made high-field MRI scanners work. I proposed new methods for fast quantitative imaging that are now the standard anatomical imaging sequence at high field for T1-weighed imaging (MP2RAGE) as well as fast B1 mapping methods (SA2RAGE) and rf-design approaches to improve T2-weighted imaging. Furthermore, exploiting the high field advantages, I developed new methods for electric property mapping, accelerated fMRI acquisitions using 3DEPI, MRI based retrospective motion correction methods and used quantitative imaging to study cortical layers cyto- and myelo-architecture in both the human and the rat brain and cerebellum and.

I now lead a group on MR Structural & Quantitative Imaging at Radboud University (RU). This has allowed me to continue developing MR imaging methods but also to find quicker translations to medical diagnoses and large population studies thanks to our more mainstream 3T MR systems. Here, I have focused my research on understanding the mechanisms behind T2* and QSM contrasts, by modelling the biophysical effects at the microstructural level and combining the information obtained from different MRI contrasts and sequences using new computational methods and deep learning. I have also been involved in various open science projects: organization of the QSM challenges (and creation of open datasets models for this matter); development of software toolbox (SEPIA toolbox for QSM) that has become the standard platform for both education and harmonization efforts.