Gordon Lab Members
Jeremy W Gordon, PhD
Principal Investigator
Dr. Jeremy Gordon, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging. He received his BS in Physics & Astronomy from the University of Georgia in 2008 and his PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. He has been at UCSF since 2013, first as a postdoctoral scholar working with Dr. Peder Larson (2013 - 2016) and then as a Senior Bioengineer (2016 - 2020) before joining the faculty in 2020. His research is focused on developing novel techniques to acquire and analyze metabolic information, leveraging a team science approach to advance the research and clinical care of patients utilizing hyperpolarized 13C and other x-nuclei such as 2H for a wide range of diseases. These methods are currently being applied in patients with pancreatic cancer as a novel tool to predict treatment response using hyperpolarized metabolic imaging, to characterize metabolic changes associated with multiple sclerosis using hyperpolarized metabolic imaging, and to develop new methods of measuring glucose metabolism in vivo and its impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease using deuterium metabolic imaging.
Contact: Jeremy.Gordon@ucsf.edu
Aditya Jhajharia, PhD
Specialist
Dr. Aditya Jhajharia, received his Ph.D. from École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris, France, in 2017. Prior to joining UCSF, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the University of Maryland Baltimore from 2018 to 2023, followed by a staff scientist position (2023-2024). During this time, his research focused on hyperpolarized imaging of carbon-13 labeled compounds to investigate metabolic processes under both normal and pathologic conditions. Aditya is currently working as a specialist in both the Department of Dermatology and the Department of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging at UCSF. His current research focuses on skin sodium MRI in clinical settings, where he is working on optimizing data acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis methodologies for X-nuclei quantification.
Contact: Aditya.Jhajharia@ucsf.edu
Tamara Vasilkovska, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Tamara Vasilkovska, PhD, originates from North Macedonia, where she obtained her medical degree. Motivated by a growing interest in scientific research, she pursued a Master of Science in Molecular Medicine (major in Neuroscience) at the University of Tübingen, where her work focused on functional neuroanatomy of fear-related brain circuits. She subsequently completed her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Antwerp, conducting biomarker discovery in a preclinical model of Huntington’s disease using multimodal MRI techniques and immunofluorescence. She is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Gordon Lab at the University of California, San Francisco, where her research focuses on the application of hyperpolarized 13C MRI to investigate brain energy metabolism in both the healthy brain and in neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. In parallel, she serves as a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar in the Nakamura Lab at the Gladstone Institutes, where she studies cellular and molecular mechanisms of energy metabolism in neurodegeneration. Outside of her research, she enjoys reading, attending concerts, hiking, and exploring new environment..
Contact: Tamara.Vasilkovska@ucsf.edu
Minjie Zhu, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Dr. Minjie Zhu joined the Gordon Lab in August 2024 following the completion of his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Under the supervision of Dirk Mayer, his doctoral research focused on developing iterative methods for image reconstruction in hyperpolarized Carbon-13 (13C) metabolic MRI. His current research interests center on the design of novel image acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis frameworks for hyperpolarized 13Cand Deuterium (2H) MRI. He is currently leading investigations into early treatment response assessment for patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
Contact: Minjie.Zhu@ucsf.edu
Xiao Gao, MS
Doctoral Candidate
Xiao is currently focused on his study on DMI, developing new ML algorithms for signal processing, exploring new 2H labeled imaging agent, extracting features from multi-modal imaging methods, 3D-printing next-generation MRI device - the list goes on and on.
Contact: Xiao.Gao@ucsf.edu
Anna Bennett Haller, MS
Graduate Student
Anna Bennett Haller received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2013. Afterwards she worked in industry under various roles covering subsea hydraulic control design, oceanic wave/current simulation, railroad inspection image analysis and software development. She found a new passion in biomedical imaging and received her Master's in Biomedical Imaging from UCSF in 2022 under advisor Dr Peder Larson. She was "bit by the research bug" and decided to continue her development as a researcher and is now a second year PhD student in the UC Berkeley - UCSF Joint Graduate Program in Bioenginnering. Her research interests include acquisition optimization for X-nuclei imaging and spectroscopy, focused mainly on 2H and 13C clinical applications at 3T. She also is true to her past software training and works to create and maintain open source metabolic simulation and modeling tools. In her spare time, Anna is an avid (albeit slow) knitter and constantly has a handful of WIPs to turn to. If you ever read one of her publications know that she took many knitting breaks to contemplate her phrasing and likely was blasting the 2001 System of a Down album Toxicity the entire time.
Contact: Anna.Bennett@ucsf.edu