Emily Popa, MS
Neuroimaging Research Associate
Emily Popa is a Neuroimaging Research Associate at the Pacific Brain Health Center. She is involved in the management of imaging data, design and implementation of quality control protocols, and image preprocessing and analysis for multi-modal datasets. Her responsibilities support projects focused on developing novel, neuroimaging-based biomarkers for clinical trials research, and identifying non-pharmacological lifestyle factors that can be integrated into clinical interventions to improve the outcomes of patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)-related neuropathology.
Emily received her Bachelor of Science in Biopsychology from the University of California Santa Barbara where she was awarded the Morgan Award for Academic Excellence by the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Master of Science in Neuroimaging and Informatics at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in 2021. She has previously worked as a research assistant at UCSB studying addiction neurobiology, biosensor development, and the neural computations underlying visual search optimization. Additionally she was a graduate research assistant at LONI of the USC Keck School of Medicine working with Arterial Spin Labeling data to investigate alterations of brain network functionality and metabolic demand in AD pathology.