March 1, 2011 | UW Bioengineering

Colin Studholme, an associate professor at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), is joining the UW as a professor with a joint appointment in the Departments of Bioengineering and Pediatrics. Studholme studies mathematical and computational analysis of biomedical image data, with a focus on how brain anatomy changes over time.

Studholme is on the faculty of UCSF’s Department of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, and leads the Biomedical Image Computing Group. His projects are focused on mathematical and computational techniques to study brain anatomy and its change over time, with a particular focus on fetal and premature neonatal brain growth.

His group is working on new techniques to solve the problem of how to produce images of the human fetal head in utero—which is especially challenging because the fetal head is often moving. Studholme’s group uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to solve this problem and provide the first high-resolution 3D images of early human brain growth. As part of this project, his group has developed a 4-dimensional computational map of tissue volume changes and surface shape changes that occur when the human brain surface begins to fold, in a process that will go on to form the complex anatomy of the adult human brain. In recent papers, Studholme’s team has mapped the points at which the first differences in the left and right sides of the brain emerge in the developing fetus, and the team has developed techniques to accurately compare brain anatomy in premature babies to that of normally developing fetuses.

Studholme grew up in the United Kingdom, earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bradford in England, and his master’s degree in image processing and remote sensing from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He worked in satellite imaging at the British Antarctic Survey and then radar imaging research at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, before he moved back to academia to earn his doctoral degree. He completed his Ph.D. in medical physics and biophysics from the University of London, in the use of information theory in the automated alignment of imaging data acquired from MRI, CT and PET scanners.

After his Ph.D., he moved to Yale University, completing a postdoctoral fellowship in diagnostic radiology, with his research focusing on brain mapping techniques for functional and structural imaging studies. Studholme joined the faculty of the UCSF Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging in 2000, and was promoted to associate professor in 2006. During his time at UCSF, he has also served as a visiting faculty member in biomedical engineering at the Mayo Clinic and at the Fields Institute of the University of Toronto, and he has recently become an associate editor for the journal IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.