Adiya Rakymzhan
Adiya Rakymzhan earned her B.S. in Physics from Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan before pursuing an M.S. in Bioengineering at the University of Washington (UW). At UW, she worked in Ricky Wang's lab, adapting optical coherence tomography (OCT) for cerebral blood imaging in preclinical models. She then completed her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), focusing on Neural Engineering. Under the mentorship of Prof. Alberto Vazquez at the Neuroimaging Lab, she investigated how inhibitory neurons shape cortical networks and cerebrovascular dynamics in both healthy and Alzheimer’s disease conditions. Her research was supported by an American Heart Association fellowship. Now a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, Adiya works in Prof. Laura Lewis’s lab, integrating fNIRS and fMRI to study how subcortical neuromodulatory activity influences neurovascular coupling across the brain.