Sam Walsh
Sam Walsh is a second-year Neuroscience PhD student in the Laboratory for Rehabilitation Neuroscience (LRNLab) at the University of Florida and an Emerging Research Scholar in Artificial Intelligence. He received his B.S. in Physics, with a minor in Biology, from Ball State University in 2023 and then spent two years as a full-time Laboratory Research Assistant at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he standardized rodent MRI protocols, implemented diffusion modeling and tractography analyses, and contributed to a co-authored study in Alzheimer's & Dementia on the ApoE4 risk variant and white matter impairment in a mouse model of amyloidosis.
Sam's research centers on building reproducible, high-throughput neuroimaging workflows that make markers of neurodegeneration more accessible. In LRNLab, he is developing a deep-learning pipeline that derives regional brain volumes from non-contrast head CT and, in collaboration with the 1Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, is testing whether those measures agree with MRI, remain stable across scanners and sites, and track cognitive status and plasma biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. Using task-based fMRI from multi-site datasets, he is also developing analysis approaches to improve discrimination between people with Parkinson's disease and healthy controls.