Kaitlin Stouffer

Kaitlin Stouffer, in PhD student, MD student, biomedical engineering, JHU

MD PhD student studying relationships between microscopic and macroscopic pathology in early Alzheimer's

I'm an MD/PhD student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. With a love of both written and numerical language, I am deeply motivated by a yearning to capture what it is I see in as many "tongues" as I can, as I believe each framework used to describe a phenomenon sheds a different but equally meaningful light that come together to create an even richer picture and deeper understanding. To that end, I'm particularly interested in helping to develop a "language" for describing the morphology of the brain, and particularly the differences that arise in the setting of various forms of dementia, as this language could help diagnose individuals using ideally non-invasive modes of technology. To craft this language, I harness tools of differential geometry to understand how brain images of different modalities and from different individuals relate to one another, with the ultimate goal of building a common, conglomerate framework upon which a rich set of attributes can sit and provide a more complete picture of the wondrous organ that is the human brain.