Skip to main content
SCMR 29th Annual Scientific Sessions Main banner
Final Program


Program-At-A-Glance

Zachary Player, BA, BSc

PhD Student
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Heights, Ohio, United States

Diffusion MRI is at the heart of Zack's academic life. He started undergrad at the University of Florida intending to pursue a career in medicine, but found the allure of mathematics and subsequently physics too irresistible, and ended up adding a decade or more to his training in the pursuit of them. He joined the lab of the only physics faculty member in the University of Florida School of Medicine, who studied diffusion MRI.

Following his graduation summa cum laude with a B.S. in Physics a B.S. in Mathematics, a B.A. in Astronomy and a minor in anthropology, he traveled to the National Institutes of Health to learn from Carlo Pierpaoli, MD/PhD, who developed and conducted the first diffusion MRI scan in humans. There he studied diffusion MRI biomarkers of multiple sclerosis and the development of Transformer models and their applications to 3D MR image processing.

At Case Western Reserve University, he is pursuing an MD/PhD in Biomedical Engineering. He has completed two years of medical school and joined the lab of Christopher Nguyen, PhD, at the Cleveland Clinic. He now studies cardiac diffusion MRI and is developing a novel 3D pulse sequence using cone trajectories.

Presentation(s):