Group Members

Rosa Tamara Branca Lab Leader (PI)

I am a Full Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy  at UNC at Chapel Hill and a faculty member of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center.

I was born in Solothurn, Switzerland, from Italian immigrants. When I was 8 month old my parents moved back to Italy, where I grew up in a tiny village called Ausonia, where I was fortunate to have Marco Lo Vecchio as my  elementary school teacher who instilled in me a love for Math. I then attended a scientific high school in the nearby town of Cassino, where I had my first exposure to Physics, which I found even more intriguing and fascinating than Math.

In 2002 I earned my Master’s degree in Physics from the Physics Department at La Sapienza (Rome, Italy). I was the first in my extended family to go and graduate from college.

In 2006, I obtained a PhD in Biophysics from the same university, while working under the guidance of Dr. Bruno Maraviglia, Dr. Silvia Capuani, and Warren Warren, at Princeton University, where I conducted all my PhD work. During my PhD I worked primarily on the non linear nuclear spin dynamics generated by long-range dipolar-dipolar spin interactions and radiation damping.

In 2006, I started my postdoctoral training at Duke University where I worked primarily on dynamics nuclear spin hyperpolarization techniques for 13C. In 2009 I became an Assistant Research Professor and I started working with nuclear spin-polarized gases such as 3He.

In 2012, I joined the Physics and Astronomy Department at UNC Chapel Hill. Since then, my research program has primarily focused on nuclear spin polarization of 129Xe, encompassing both the physics, the hardware, and its biomedical imaging applications.

Current Graduate Students

Sebastian Atalla

Sebastian is a forth year graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. So far, his research has involved pulse sequence programming for clinical MRI scanners,  developing of improved image reconstruction techniques, and hardware development for NMR in the ultralow field regime.

Andrew Maresca

Andrew is a first-year graduate student. He just recently joined our lab and is being trained on a variety of techniques and tools we use in our lab.

Students That Graduated From Our Lab

Michele Kelley

As a Royster Fellow and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardee, Michele’s work primarily focused on the physics of spin-exchange optical pumping, investigating the origins of its inefficiencies.

After graduation, Michele moved to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as postdoctoral fellow. At NIST, she is developing a microscope for NV center qubits. NV centers in diamond lattices are one of the potential quantum qubits being explored. The theory behind qubits is similar to that of NMR.

Nick Bryden

As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Nick primarily focused on developing the hardware for our low-field MR system and understanding nuclear spin relaxation properties at ultralow magnetic field strengths.

After graduation, Nick was hired as research staff at the Kostas Research Institute at Northeastern University.

Christian McHugh

Christian worked primarily on enhancing the detection sensitivity of NMR in the mid and high field range using hyperCEST, a technique that can enhance NMR sensitivity by several orders of magnitude.

He demonstrated the use of  hyperCEST for the MR detection of gas microbubbles, a common ultrasound contrast agent, to facilitate combined MR/US biomedical applications.

After graduation, Christian joined the Physics and Astronomy faculty at UMass Dartmouth.

Andrew McCallister

Andrew started working with Dr. Branca in 2014 and graduated in 2019. As a Physics PhD student in our lab, Drew’s worked on the detection of human brown adipose tissue with MRI and PET, lung ventilation function in patients with cystic fibrosis with hyperpolarized xenon gas and 19F gas, and on the development of a new, more efficient, xenon gas polarizer.

Drew is currently working as data analyst at Afiniti.

Michael Antonacci

Right after graduation in 2019, Michael joined the Physics Department faculty at Saint Vincent College where he is working on novel nuclear spin hyperpolarization techniques such as SABRE (Signal Amplification By Reversible Exchange). As a PhD student in our lab, Michael worked on a variety of different projects, from the development of an ultra-low field MR spectrometer, to studying the depolarization of xenon by dark rubidium, to the development of novel applications of dissolved-phase hyperpolarized xenon for magnetic resonance spectroscopy and imaging.

Alex Burant

After graduation, Alex joined the faculty of the Physics Department at the University of Arizona. He joined our group in the summer of 2013 and graduated in the summer of 2018. In our lab he worked on a variety of different projects, among which characterizing the depolarization of xenon in magnetic field gradients as well as on characterizing the dephasing and depolarization mechanisms of hyperpolarized xenon near superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles.

Le Zhang

Le was the first student graduating from our lab. He began working in our lab in the fall of 2012. His research involved the study of the temperature dependence of the chemical shift of lipid-dissolved xenon and its application for in vivo thermometry. After graduation, Le joined the group of Holden Wu at UCLA and then that of Jim Pipe at the Mayo Clinic as PostDoc.

Nikolas Jauch

Nikolas graduated with a BS degree in Physics and Computer Science from UNC. He began working in our lab during his junior year, after taking a course in electronics.  In our lab, he worked on the analysis and construction of a sensitive resonator for ultralow field NMR applications. He performed LtSpice and COMSOL simulations of the resonator and then proceeded to the construction and characterization of several implementations of the coil.

He has now joined the Physics graduate program at Clemson University.

Jack Garside

He then entered  the M.D. program at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Boris Mesits

Boris graduated with highest honors with a thesis on an Earth’s field NMR spectrometer. After graduating, he entered the Physics graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is currently using qubits as sensors.

Hoyt Patrick Taylor

Patrick completed an honor thesis working on new ways to analyze diffusion and functional MR images of the human brain. He graduated with honors in the Spring of 2009 and joined Dr. Yap group at UNC as graduate student in the Computer Science department.

Elizabeth Smith

Elizabeth was a Physics major at UNC. She worked on the detection of white adipose tissue browning using xenon-enhanced CT scanning.

Christian Browning

Christian graduated from UNC in 2017 with a BS in Physics. He constructed and tested our first  prototype of a portable, Earth’s field NMR spectrometer. He is now working as Data Scientist at Lowe’s Companies.

Lucas Dehart

Lucas graduated from UNC with a BS in Physics. He started our work on a portable, earth-field NMR spectrometer. He is now an Associate Director at the Georgetown Learning Center in MaClean, Virginia.

Nick Weimer

Nick graduated from UNC with a BS in Chemistry. He then went to NC State to earn a degree in engineering.  In our lab he used contrast enhanced ultrasound to measure blood flow to brown fat in different mouse strains.  He also worked on the quantification of xenon uptake in BAT  during thermogenesis.

Kevin Montes

Kevin was a Physics major at Florida State University. He worked in our lab in 2014 with Alex Burant, for the Computational Astronomy and Physics (CAP) Summer REU Program. He worked on finite element analysis simulations of gas flow and temperature during SEOP, and his work was then presented  at the NSF CUR REU Conference. His summer research experience inspired him to seek research opportunities at UF. After graduation he then  earned a PhD in Physics at MIT at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Arjun Raghavan

Arjun was a physics major at UNC and worked in our lab for just one semester. His work consisted in developing  a model of the lungs that could be easily scaled from mouse to human and that could be used in Monte Carlo simulations to understand helium and xenon gas dephasing in the heterogeneous lung environment.

Paul La Fosse

Paul worked in our lab during his junior and senior year along side Michael Antonacci. While in our lab, he worked on the calibration of our small animal ventilator, which we currently use for small animal imaging studies with hyperpolarized xenon gas. He is now working at UNC as a research assistant.

Carlos Floyd

Carlos earned a bachelor degree at UNC  in Physics and Biology. He worked as research assistant in our lab during his junior and senior year. In our lab he worked on a variety of different projects, from modeling xenon uptake in brown adipose tissue to blood flow measurements in BAT by contrast-enhanced ultrasound. After graduation he went to earn a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Maryland at College Park.

Victor was an undergraduate at UNC, where he double-majored in Physics and Economics and minored in Chinese. During his senior year, he worked with Le Zhang on the high-resolution NMR spectrometer, exploring the properties of lipid-dissolved xenon. Victor dedicated countless nights and weekends to this research. After earning a Master of Science from the Olin Business School, he is now working as an investment analyst.

Victor Zhao

Christian White

Christian worked in our lab during his junior and senior years, focusing on 129Xe gas hyperpolarization. His efforts resulted in a significant boost in our polarizer performance, increasing polarization from 5% to 14%.

After graduating from UNC, Christian earned a PhD in Physics from NC State University.

Arjun Khanna

Arjun was the first undergraduate student I worked with. He was a chemistry and economic major at Duke University and he worked on a variety of projects, from the detection of brown fat activity with BOLD MRI to the construction of our small animal ventilator, which we currently use for ALL our in vivo animal studies with hyperpolarized xenon gas.

After graduating, Arjun then received an MD-PhD from Harvard Medical School and he is now a neurosurgery resident at Harvard Medical School.

Edric Eun

Edric was the only high school students who worked in our lab during his senior year at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. He worked on the  Earth’s field NMR spectrometer project.

Ting He

Ting was a post-doc in our lab from 2012-2013, when she worked on the detection of BAT by using hyperpolarized 129Xe gas MRI. Now she is a member in Dr. Song Lab and her current research focuses on understanding how the neural circuitry mechanisms of serotonin regulate adult hippocampal neurogenesis.