Melissa J. Tinney, MD

Dr. Tinney expressed an interest in new ways of adapting concussion testing to athletes with disabilities through her work in adaptive sports medicine.

Dr. Tinney attended the University of Michigan for her undergraduate degree in Movement Science and attended medical school at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. She completed her residency training in PM&R at the University of Michigan in 2006. After finishing residency she joined the Veterans Health Administration. She works primarily as a staff physician at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center providing care in a variety of areas including amputation, general PM&R and musculoskeletal pain. Dr. Tinney’s clinical responsibilities with Michigan Medicine include an outpatient practice focusing on the rehabilitation and care of amputees and comprehensive wound care.

Sami Barmada, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School. His clinical interests center on patients with dementia and motor neuron disease. His research focuses on the pathologic overlap between amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and how we can take advantage of the convergence to identify new and effective therapies for these devastating disorders.

Dr. Eleanna Varangis is an assistant professor of Movement Science in the Michigan Concussion Center and the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan. She received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Economics from Barnard College of Columbia University. She completed her master’s degree and PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her dissertation research focused on the long-term effects of football-related concussions on cognitive performance, white matter integrity, and functional connectivity during an episodic memory task in middle-adulthood. Her postdoctoral research with Dr. Yaakov Stern at Columbia University’s Taub Institute explored similar relationships among cognitive performance and functional connectivity during both rest and task periods in healthy adults across the adult lifespan.

Now, her research utilizes cognitive assessments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) both at rest as well as during a cognitive task in order to probe ways in which mTBI affects neurocognitive function across both short- and long-term timescales. Her training in the analysis of functional and structural MRI in both former athletes and healthy adults informs much of her approach to exploring the effects of mTBI on neurocognitive health in the context of aging. The overall goal of her research is to characterize the ways in which mTBI affects brain health and cognitive function across the lifespan, and to identify individual factors that may protect against or exacerbate deviations from a healthy brain aging trajectory.

Dr. Eleanna Varangis, director of the ATHINA Lab, is seeking a postdoctoral research fellow to begin as early as Summer 2023. Details: myumi.ch/ezXp2. Posting on U-M Jobs site: myumi.ch/JpRbV.

Dr. Popovich is a Sports Neurology fellowship-trained Neurologist who provides clinical concussion care in the University of Michigan NeuroSport clinic and is a team physician for Eastern Michigan University Athletics. Dr. Popovich has a number of research interests focused on treatment and recovery after traumatic brain injury. He has developed a patient database for the Sports Neurology clinic which tracks the pathogenesis and recovery after a concussion to evaluate clinically useful biomarkers of recovery and the roles of exercise in recovery.

Dr. Jason Goldstick is a Research Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan, the Director of Statistics and Methods at the CDC-funded University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center, and has a broad research portfolio in injury prevention. He has been the lead statistician on multiple NIH-funded proposals related to head injury and has co-authored multiple papers related to concussion and other head injuries.

Dr. Goldstick’s past research broadly focused on social epidemiology in a variety of settings, including infectious disease, childhood problem behaviors, substance use, and violence. Inherent to these types of problems is a necessity to devise methods for complex data structures such as longitudinal and spatially dependent data, which is what brought him to this line of research during his Ph.D. training in statistics. After graduate school, Dr. Goldstick spent two years as a research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in the Epidemiology Department, working on infectious disease modeling. Dr. Goldstick’s current work at the Injury Center involves a variety of injury-related research projects, most related to substance use and/or violence. A recurring theme in his research is the analysis of how contextual information (e.g. spatially/temporally proximate conditions) modulates individual-level outcomes, both in terms of direct effects and how they modify dependencies between variables. Dr. Goldstick is the PI of an R03 funded to study age-specific risk factors for and comorbidities of (e.g. violence, sexual risk behaviors) and substance use.

Xuming He received his PhD in Statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He joined the University of Michigan as H. C. Carver Collegiate Professor in 2011. His prior appointments include faculty positions at the National University of Singapore and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include broad areas of statistical inference, including quantile regression and subgroup analysis. His interdisciplinary research aims to promote the better use of statistics in biosciences, climate studies, concussion research, and social-economic studies.

Dr. Douglas Noll’s group develops magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology for mapping the functional organization the human brain performing specific tasks (known as functional MRI or fMRI). The group’s research is in two main areas: 1) understanding the neurovascular physiology associated with brain activity and quantifying the biophysical connection to the MR images and 2) development of image acquisition, image reconstruction, signal processing, and hardware approaches to provide the high-speed and robust measurement of function over the entire brain. As part of the Functional MRI Laboratory, this group collaborates with a broad range of neuroscientists to develop an understanding of the organization and functioning of the normal brain and to apply technological advances to quantitative imaging of brain function in a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Noll serves on the Concussion Center’s Faculty Council, providing intellectual guidance and strategic recommendations to the center’s leadership.