The Bright Lab celebrates Apoorva Ayyagari’s completion of her MS degree in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern! After 2 excellent years as a core member of our lab, Apoorva successfully defended her MS thesis, titled “Understanding noise in spinal cord BOLD fMRI data with a breath-hold paradigm to investigate feasibility of studying vascular reactivity“. In this work, she rigorously assesses cardiac and respiratory noise, motion confounds, and co-linearity between different physiologic signals in spinal cord imaging data. Spinal cord fMRI data are notoriously challenging to work with due to all of these artifactual signals, and this thesis reflects excellent progress in understanding and modeling these factors. Apoorva’s many contributions in the lab will continue to benefit our ongoing projects in mapping cerebrovascular reactivity amplitude and latency, standardizing how physiologic data is collected during MRI scanning, preprocessing spinal cord fMRI data, and quantifying relationships between different sources of signal variance in these data. Although we are extremely sad to see her go, we wish Apoorva the very best as she starts her new job in human factors engineering in Evanston. Congrats Apoorva!