Dogu Baran Aydogan, PhD, leads the CNIR group. He is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at A.I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Sciences, University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio, Finland. He is at the same time a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. His research focuses on developing methods for medical image processing and connectivity analysis, particularly in the field of diffusion MRI-based tractography.

Prior to this he was a research fellow at Aalto University, where he worked together with Prof. Risto Ilmoniemi on connectivity-assistant brain stimulation. Between 2014-2018, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at University of Southern California, where he and Professor Yonggang Shi studied the structural connectivity of the brain and developed new techniques to analyze white matter connections.

Dr. Aydogan has received numerous awards for his works, including the MICCAI Young Scientist Award in 2016 for his probabilistic tractography framework. He also received several victories in international tractography challenges. He is a co-inventor of a real-time image analysis method for medical applications using mobile devices (US patent: 11112406), and has developed Trekker, an open-source implementation of his tractography algorithms.