JungHwan Kim
Associate Professor
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Department of Neurosurgery
The Human Neuroimaging and Biotransport Laboratory (HNBL, jhkimlab.org), led by Dr. Kim, possesses an interdisciplinary mission to integrate advanced human functional MRI techniques into clinical
applications. We work with various collaborative and innovative research teams consisting of scientists,
engineers and clinicians in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, MR physics, neurology and neurosurgery.
This integration involves the fusion of cutting-edge biotransport modeling methods with high-resolution
human neuroimaging modalities. The central focus of HNBL's endeavors lies in leveraging high-resolution fMRI to deepen our understanding of the neurovascular and neurometabolic coupling within the human brain, which gives rise to the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal. Dr. Kim’s team focuses on measuring briefly evoked BOLD responses, known as hemodynamic response function (HRF), and investigating their temporal and spatial characteristics to evaluate microvascular health in human brain. They characterized the HRF parameters as a function of age and sex in a large cohort of healthy adults (and more recently, in patients with Alzheimer Disease) to set the stage for developing imaging biomarkers for pathology correlates to abnormalities in neuro-vascular and neuro-metabolic coupling. Another dimension of their research focuses on establishing fMRI metrics of cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) for testing the integrity of vascular health as a metric for detecting pathology-induced neurovascular uncoupling in clinical fMRI brain mapping. Ultimately, this research can be expanded as a clinical diagnostic tool for various brain pathologies involving cerebrovascular function without showing any structural abnormality such as mild traumatic brain injury, dementia, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s Disease.
Education & Training
PhD, University of Florida, 2010