Gaurav Bhalerao

I am postdoctoral researcher at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN). My research interests include neuroimaging in psychiatry, machine learning, and computational modelling of brain stimulation. 

I am currently working in the Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) project which aims to find news ways of detecting, treating and preventing dementia. My work involves adapting UK Biobank brain imaging pipeline for various DPUK datasets that are made accessible through the DPUK Data portal to advance dementia research. This work also includes exploring the inclusion of additional pipelines for the calculation of measures specifically relevant to dementia cohorts and develop methods to facilitate cross-cohort analyses. Additionally, I will  be working on making the pipeline accessible from the DPUK remote analysis environment for the users of the DPUK Data Portal that wish to apply the pipeline to new datasets.

I work with various neuroimaging software/tools for the analysis multimodal brain magnetic resonance imaging data such as FSL, SPM, Freesurfer, etc. I utilize various programming languages such as Python, MATLAB, R for coding, machine learning and statistical data analysis. I enjoy working with big data from various psychiatric cohorts, developing and troubleshooting brain imaging pipelines and reproducibility in neuroimaging research.

I have been selected as a UKRN Local Network Lead where I work collaboratively with other leads to engage and expand the Reproducible Research Oxford (RROx) community via networking, training and other events at the University of Oxford. In December 2022, I have been awarded with Software Sustainibility Institute (SSI) fellowship for the year 2023. With this exciting opportunity, I am looking forward to engage and collaborate with the research software community, and execute my fellowship plans for contributing to and nurturing best practice in research software within DPUK and further afield. 

I have completed my Masters in Biomedical engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology (Manipal, India) and PhD in Dept of Psychiatry at National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS, Bengaluru, India). For my PhD, I worked on developing machine learning classification models with the neuroimaging and eye tracking data for Schizophrenia and Obsessive Compulsive disorder. I also worked on developing computational brain models for studying the electric field distribution in the responders and non-responders of Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) technique.