Nozomi Nishimura PhD

Nozomi Nishimura grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She majored in Physics at Harvard College, where she worked with Prof. Eric Mazur on femtosecond laser ablation. In graduate school, she became interested in neuroscience and worked with Prof. David Kleinfeld at the University of California at San Diego. Although still in the Physics Department, her research focused on studying blood flow in the brain of rodents and developing laser-based models of small strokes. She came to Biomedical Engineering at Cornell in 2006 to do a postdoc with Prof. Chris Schaffer. She became an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering in 2013. At Cornell, current research expands the use of in vivo imaging techniques to study a variety of disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiac disease, and cancer metastasis. As a postdoc, she was awarded a L’Oreal USA Fellowship for Women in Science, the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship, and while at UC San Diego, she received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Prof. Nishimura is interested in how the vasculature, immune, inflammatory systems and cells native to a tissue interact in disease states. Her lab’s strategy is to develop novel tools to image the contribution of multiple physiological systems to diseases with in vivo animal models. To study these systems at their full complexity in the complete living animal, they use multiphoton microscopy to image cell dynamics in rodents. They also use femtosecond laser ablation and quantitative analysis to dissect function in the living system. In diseases as diverse as cardiovascular disease and cancer metastasis, the microvasculature provides an avenue of access for immune and inflammatory cells. Alterations in blood flow and the invasion of blood-borne cells are examples of complex events which can shape how a disease either progresses or resolves. The lab compares these dynamics across multiple organ systems and diseases.