Tavarekere N Nagaraja, PhD

Biographical Statement

Dr. Nagaraja is a cancer researcher at Henry Ford Cancer. As a neuroscientist, he has a broad background in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, quantitative autoradiography and fluorescence microscopy. His PhD is in neurophysiology, and he has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and five book chapters. He also serves as a manuscript reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals, and as a grant reviewer for several funding organizations including the American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health, India Alliance DBT Wellcome Trust, California North state University College of Pharmacy and the Netherlands Technology Foundation. He is a Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA).

Research Interests

• Delivering treatments to diseases that affect primarily the brain is difficult due to the blood/brain barrier. For the past 20 years, Dr. Nagaraja's research has focused on clearing that obstacle by working to understand changes to brain blood vessel function using animal models of stroke and brain tumors. His research has primarily focused on:
  • The vascular pathophysiology of stroke and primary brain tumors such as glioma
  • Vascular protective therapies for stroke
  • Mechanisms of vascular normalization to improve drug delivery to brain tumors
• Using MRI of the brain, quantitative autoradiography and fluorescence microscopy combined with a variety of histological and biochemical methods with improved functional outcomes as the primary endpoint.
• Some of the MRI methods the team developed for animal brain scanning have been used in translational studies for human brain imaging.

Email: tnagara1@hfhs.org