Having worked both on the more fundamental/basic physics and clinical ends of MRI, has strengthened my conviction that the most relevant contribution a physicist can to make to medical imagign is to not just offer good diagnostic images but, more importantly, create quantitative information, making diagnostic instruments into measuring devices. 

My current research goals are: 

i. To create new strategies to obtain both high quality and informative images that take full advantage of the interaction of the used magnetic fields (static and radiofrequency) with the body’s electro-magnetic tissue properties; 

ii. To contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to the observed relaxation and electromagnetic contrasts and devise protocols that could give clinicians and neuroscientists an increased capability to measure tissue property maturation, degeneration and viability; 

iii. To develop faster acquisition schemes for fMRI that ensure a more robust and efficient brain activity detection with MRI; 

iv. To bridge the gap between engineering, radiological and neuroscience communities, making the information regarding the capabilities and needs of each field more understandable and available to each group.

And that is how I ended up coming back every once in a while to Coimbra to teach magnetic resonance imaging to biomedical engineering students!