Meet the Team
Investigators and students in CViL come from diverse backgrounds. Bioengineers, Electrical, Mechanical engineers and Physicists form the technical core of the team. Active collaboration with clinical colleagues is a primary component of each project we undertake. Working with clinicians from Radiology, General Cardiology, Interventional Cardiology, EP and the heart failure group we form comprehensive research teams.
Elliot R. McVeigh, PhD
Lab Director
Before joining the University of California, San Diego, McVeigh was chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the Medical Imaging Laboratory. In 1999, McVeigh joined forces with the Laboratory of Cardiac Energetics at the National Institutes of Health to develop a research program in cardiovascular interventional MRI. McVeigh had been on the Johns Hopkins faculty since 1988, immediately after earning his Ph.D. in medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, where he also earned a bachelor’s in physics in 1984.
Lab Assistants
Andriel J. Schluchter
Lab Manager: Administration, IT, Research, and 3D Modelling & Printing
Andriel Schluchter is a budding engineer and scientist looking to advance R&D in the field of bioengineering. Andriel served in the United States Navy as a nuclear electronics technician from 2007 to 2013, and was honorably discharged to pursue higher education at Old Dominion University in Virginia. They graduated in May, 2016 with a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.S. in biology, before moving to San Diego and establishing the UCSD Cardiovascular Imaging Lab (CViL) as a lab manager and research associate under Dr. Elliot McVeigh. Andriel obtained a M.S. in Bioengineering in 2020 with their work in electrical impedance tomography.
Post-Doctoral Researchers
Brendan Colvert, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Brendan graduated from the University of Southern California summa cum laude, with a BS Aerospace Engineering in 2014, a MS in Aerospace Engineering in 2015, and received a PhD in Aerospace Engineering in 2018. Brendan joined CViL in September of 2018, and is continuing his research in fluid dynamics of the heart.
Davis Vigneault, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Davis graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biochemistry from Tufts University in 2011. He then began medical school at Tufts University School of Medicine, and in his second year joined the combined MD/DPhil Medical Scientist Training Program as an NIH-Oxford Scholar. For his graduate work, Davis was co-advised by Prof. Alison Noble, DPhil, at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. David Bluemke, MD, PhD, at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center. Davis successfully defended his thesis, titled “Quantification of Regional Cardiac Function: Clinically-Motivated Algorithm Development and Application to Cardiac Magnetic Resonance and Computed Tomography,” in September of 2017. Davis has joined the CViL group as a postdoctoral scholar, where he will continue his research into the application of deep neural networks to the analysis of functional cardiac computed tomography.
Graduate Student Researchers
Lauren Severance
Graduate Student in Bioengineering
Lauren is currently a PhD student in the bioengineering department. She grew up in the Kansas City area and earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University in 2016. As an undergraduate, she pursued research on the clinical effects of temporal lobe epilepsy using MRI data.
Gabrielle Colvert
Graduate Student in Bioengineering
Gabby received a BS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2016. She is currently a PhD student in Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego. She is working on her thesis project, “Comprehensive analysis of endocardial strain using 4DCT.” Specifically, she is interested in using noninvasive imaging for earlier diagnosis of cardiac diseases and patient stratification for minimally invasive interventions.
Ashish Manohar
Graduate Student in Mechanical Engineering
Ashish is a PhD Candidate in the department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. He received his BE (2015) and MS (2017) degrees in mechanical engineering from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore and UC San Diego, respectively. His research interests include cardiac mechanics and improving the spatio-temporal resolution limits of 4DCT for the assessment of regional cardiac function.
Zhennong Chen
Graduate Student in Bioengineering
Zhennong is currently a Ph.D. student in the bioengineering department. His previous research focused on developing a novel algorithm to accurately measure the coronary stenosis diameter in CCTA. He is now researching the application of deep learning techniques on CT image processing.
Masters Students
Chansu Kim
Masters Student in Bioengineering
Kyle is a M.S student in Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego. He was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea until 2010. He received B.S. degree from Georgia Tech in Biomedical Engineering. Kyle served in the Republic of Korea Army in 2013 for two years and was discharged as a sergeant. He is currently working on his project for MS thesis: developing automated left ventricular myocardium segmentation using CT images to further study LV myocardium function. Kyle has obtained his M.S. as of mid-2020, and is currently seeking employment while continuing to aid the lab.
