Meet the Team

Aaron Boes, MD, PhD

Lab Director and Principal Investigator
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Dr. Boes' research focuses on the relationship of brain structure and function. He has used a variety of approaches to this topic, including structural MRI, lesion mapping, and resting state functional connectivity MRI. He recently developed a novel approach for investigating the network effects of focal brain lesions that integrates lesion mapping with normative data from the human connectome project. Dr. Boes is also a physician and splits his clinical time between pediatric neurology and directing the Iowa Noninvasive Brain Stimulation Clinical Program.

Brandt Uitermarkt, MA

Research Specialist

Brandt has a Masters Degree in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience. He is involved with ongoing multimodal neuromodulation studies as well as structural and functional neuroimaging projects in the lab.

Joel Bruss, BA

Imaging Specialist and Research Manager

Joel has over a decade of experience in lesion mapping studies as well as structural and functional imaging. Current projects focus on quantifying lesion load in white matter tracts and processing fcMRI data.

Carrie Shea, MA

Project Coordinator

Carrie has a master's in clinical psychology from the University of Northern Iowa and is in both the Boes and Hwang Labs as a study coordinator for the Iowa Neurological Lesion Registry.

Asmaa Mhanna, MD

Clinical Trials Research Assistant.

Asmaa graduated from Al-Quds University- Faculty of Medicine. She completed her pediatric residency in Jordan, followed by a 1-year child neurology fellowship. She is interested in epilepsy research as well as other pediatric neurology disorders. Asmaa recently joined the Boes Lab as a Clinical Trials Research Assistant. Her current project uses lesion-symptom mapping for the localization of naming deficit after temporal lobe epilepsy surgery. She is also involved in another project that elucidates the role of lesion location in predicting cognitive outcomes in children with focal brain lesions.

Mark Bowren, PhD

Postdoctoral fellow

Mark is a clinical neuropsychology postdoctoral fellow. He performs neuropsychological evaluations through the Benton Neuropsychology Clinic, and his research with our team focuses on lesion network mapping of cognitive and emotional processes.

Jax Skye, BS

Neuroscience PhD Student

Jax is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience. His work uses lesion-symptom mapping, lesion network mapping, and structural equation modeling to further understand perturbations in space and time perception in patients with focal brain damage. Jax will be joining the Laboratory for Ecological Inference (Dr. James Traer) and the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab (Dr. Dorit Kliemann) as a postdoctoral scholar in summer of 2023

Michal Brzus, BSE, MS

Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD Student

Michal is a Ph.D. student in Electrical & Computer Engineering. As a part of SINAPSE lab and the Boes Lab, he specializes in developing state-of-the-art medical tools using the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence. His current project utilizes Deep Learning, classical Machine Learning, and Image Processing techniques to build an automated tool for neuroimage processing, lesion segmentation, and outcome prediction.

Hassan Ahamed

MSTP Student

Hassan is a medical student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Iowa. His current project uses lesion network mapping to better understand the localization of central post-stroke pain.

Alyssa Sullivan, BS

Clinical Psychology PhD Student

Alyssa is in her last year as a Clinical Psychology Graduate Student. Her current projects in the lab include the recruitment and identification of clinical patients who sustained a focal brain injury in early life. Where she's interested in investigating the contribution of different aspects of environment, age, and injury for predicting thinking, mood, and behavior outcomes after brain injury and currently examining the utility of lesion-symptom mapping, often done with adult samples, for predicting neuropsychological outcomes when brain injury occurs in early-life.

Jamie Kaminski, BS

Clinical Psychology PhD Student

Jamie is a fourth-year doctoral student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Iowa. She is interested in clinical neuropsychology and studies predictors of cognitive outcome following brain injury. Currently, she is working on a clinical outcome prediction model using brain lesion location.

Amber Thomas, BS

Clinical Psychology PhD Student

Amber Thomas is a second-year Clinical Psychology Ph.D. student specializing in Neuropsychology. Her current projects in the lab focus on utilizing the lesion methods to understand how brain lesions affect emotional and behavioral dysregulation. She also has interests in monitoring and improving long-term mood-related outcomes in patients that have experienced an acquired brain injury.

Kinnari Karia, BS

Medical Student

Kinnari is a medical student at Iowa planning to apply into neurology. Her current project evaluates lesion structural and functional connectivity to predict cognitive changes.

Alan Romanowski, BS

Research Intern

Alan is a recent graduate from the University of Iowa with an interest in neuropsychology, particularly neural correlates of mood and cognition. He involves himself in multiple projects, including recruitment for the Iowa Lesion Registry, and frequently collaborates with other researchers. His current project looks to analyze behavioral and emotional change following epilepsy resection. He is also awaiting graduate school decisions for the Fall 2023 term.