Research Associate in Ultrasound Brain Imaging (Department of Earth Science and Engineering)

The post is funded as part of a £3.6-million research award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under the Transformative Healthcare Technologies programme to support the project "Imaging the brain with ultrasound full-waveform inversion".

The purpose of the project is to develop a new modality for biomedical imaging of the adult human brain using relatively low-frequency ultrasound, transmitted through the bones of the skull, and recorded on the far side of the head.

The research associate will work on this project within a multidisciplinary team of scientists, engineers and programmers, and will have opportunities to present at conferences, publish their original finding in refereed journals, attract external research funding, and collaborate with an associated commercial spin-out company if they so wish.

Conventional ultrasound cannot see usefully through the skull, but low-frequency ultrasound can. Full-waveform inversion, a technique originally developed to image within the earth, is then capable of making high-resolution images from these low-frequency data by using the full-physics of wave propagation to solve the associated inverse problem.

The post is part of a multidisciplinary team that will design and build the imaging system, acquire data from volunteers, develop, test and apply analytical and computational techniques to these laboratory data, and interpret the results, in order to recover high-resolution images of the living adult human brain within the skull.

Your main duties will be to improve the algorithms and data analysis as part of this project, by mathematical analysis, algorithm design, programming in high-level languages, and application of those and other programmes to real in-vivo data. Your work will involve signal processing, simulation, optimisation and least-squares inversion of large data sets in complex multi-dimensional problems.

Ultimately, the technology and systems that the project will deliver, aim to transform clinical practice and patient outcomes in acute neurological conditions such as stroke, head trauma and seizure.

You will:

• Hold a PhD in a relevant discipline, or have at least equivalent research experience in an industrial or commercial context.


• practical experience with full-waveform inversion, or the quantitative analysis of transmitted ultrasound, or neuroimaging.


• You will have advanced numerical skills relevant to scientific data analysis.


• You will be a competent creator and user of original programmes or scripts in Python and/or Matlab and/or SeisSpace.

Three positions are available in total.
The positions are full time fixed term and will run until 31 July 2025.
The positions include the possibility of collaboration and/or consultancy with the related commercial spin-out company Sonalis Imaging Ltd.
The College believes that the use of animals in research is vital to improve human and animal health and welfare. Animals may only be used in research programmes where their use is shown to be necessary for developing new treatments and making medical advances. Imperial is committed to ensuring that, in cases where this research is deemed essential, all animals in the College's care are treated with full respect, and that all staff involved with this work show due consideration at every level.