Associate Professor Fatima Nasrallah

Principal Research Fellow

Queensland Brain Institute
f.nasrallah@uq.edu.au
+61 7 344 33004

Overview

Dr. Nasrallah is a neuroscientist with a background in magnetic resonance and interdisciplinary brain research. She graduated with a PhD in neurochemistry and NMR from the Neuroscience Research Australia Institute (NeurRA) at the University of New South Wales in 2009. In April 2009, She spent 3 years at the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (A*STAR) where she pioneered the use of magnetic resonance imaging as a tool in cognitive brain research in the rodent. In 2013, she was appointed as senior research fellow at the Clinical Imaging Research Center where she delved into the clinical realms of human imaging. In late 2015, she returned to Australia as a Motor Accident and Injury Commission fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at the University of Queensland (UQ) where she independently heads her own group. Her research spans basic and clinical brain research with the the overall aim of understanding how the brain functions in health and injury, specifically, developing methods for early diagnosis of primary biomarkers following injury and translating these findings.

Research Interests

  • Traumatic Brain Injury
    The development of translational imaging methods for the early diagnosis of brain function and prediction of patient outcome.

Research Impacts

Through her work, she has established herself as one of the world experts in the area of functional brain imaging in rodent models. Her most significant contribution was made in 2014 when she demonstrated for the first time, imaging resting state functional connectivity in the mouse brain using MRI. This has made a major impact to the field especially the potential to translate such a technique in human to mouse models. This work was published in the prestigious Neuroimage journal. More impactful was the discovery that these resting state networks could detect cognition in the rat brain after a spatial learning memory task, which was also published in Neuroimage. A major contribution to the field is applying these MRI methods for clinical applications of injury and stroke. She is now leading a nationwide multicenter trial in patients with traumatic brain injury with the hope of using advanced neuroimaging methods to improve patient outcomes.

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine, University of NSW

Publications

View all Publications

Supervision

  • Doctor Philosophy

  • Doctor Philosophy

  • Doctor Philosophy

View all Supervision

Publications

Book Chapter

  • Lyu, Junyan, Xu, Pengxiao, Nasrallah, Fatima and Tang, Xiaoying (2023). Learning Ontology-Based Hierarchical Structural Relationship for Whole Brain Segmentation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. (pp. 385-394) Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-43901-8_37

  • Chuang, Kai-Hsiang and Nasrallah, Fatima A. (2012). Functional MRI of neural plasticity and drug effect in the brain. Advances in bio-imaging: from physics to signal understanding issues. (pp. 17-25) edited by Nicolas Loménie, Daniel Racoceanu and Alexandre Gouaillard. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-25547-2_2

Journal Article

Conference Publication

Edited Outputs

Other Outputs

Grants (Administered at UQ)

PhD and MPhil Supervision

Current Supervision

  • Doctor Philosophy — Principal Advisor

  • Doctor Philosophy — Principal Advisor

    Other advisors:

  • Doctor Philosophy — Principal Advisor

  • Doctor Philosophy — Principal Advisor

    Other advisors:

  • Doctor Philosophy — Associate Advisor