The main goal of Dr. Augustinack’s research is to validate neuroimaging, such as MRI, with ground truth histologic analyses and to advance neuroanatomical and pathological biomarkers for in vivo imaging. Her laboratory bridges the domains of ground truth histologic staining and MRI tissue properties. The laboratory focuses both on the methods for combining ex vivo (post mortem) MRI and histology and on establishing diagnostics markers to evaluate neurodegenerative disease with neuroimaging.
Dr. Augustinack is a neuroanatomist and neuroscientist with broad background in human neuroanatomy and brain mapping. She teaches and contributes to the Health Science and Technology (HST130, block II) neuroanatomy course at Harvard Medical School and serves as the Co-Director of the graduate course Neuroanatomy and Neuropathology at Harvard Medical School. She has special interest in the neuroanatomy and the neuropathology of the medial temporal lobe in the preclinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease. In all of her projects, she applies her neuroanatomy knowledge to better understand the structure-function relationship in disease using MRI modeling.
Education
PhD in Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Iowa
Select Publications
1. Saygin ZM, Kliemann D, Iglesias JE, van der Kouwe AJW, Boyd E, Reuter M, Stevens A, Van Leemput K, McKee A, Frosch MP, Fischl B, Augustinack JC; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging reveals nuclei of the human amygdala: manual segmentation to automatic atlas. Neuroimage. 2017 Jul 15;155:370-382.
2. Augustinack JC, Huber KE, Postelnicu GM, Kakunoori S, Wang R, van der Kouwe AJ, Wald LL, Stein TD, Frosch MP, Fischl B. Entorhinal verrucae geometry is coincident and correlates with Alzheimer’s lesions: a combined neuropathology and high-resolution ex vivo MRI analysis. Acta Neuropathol. 2012 Jan;123(1):85-96.
3. Augustinack JC, van der Kouwe AJ, Blackwell ML, Salat DH, Wiggins CJ, Frosch MP, Wiggins GC, Potthast A, Wald LL, Fischl BR. Detection of entorhinal layer II using 7Tesla [corrected] magnetic resonance imaging. Ann Neurol. 2005 Apr;57(4):489-94.
Highlights
Dr. Augustinack has taught neuroanatomy at Harvard Medical School for 15 years.