Drs. Kochanek and Jha at a reception in her honor during her visit to Pittsburgh.
Former Safar Center trainee and investigator Dr. Ruchira Jha served as a visiting professor on December 10-11, 2024. She is chief of Neurocritical Care and Director of Neurocritical Care Research at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and an international expert on cerebral edema-related research. Her Critical Care Medicine Grand Rounds lecture, titled “Decoding heterogeneity in acute brain injury: From single cell to bedside” represented a tour de force that addressed her recently published and ongoing studies including translational work using human brain organoids and cerebral spinal fluid to explore sex differences in patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage, studies on the genetics of brain swelling after traumatic brain injury, and the use of single cell RNA sequencing in animal models and humans to unravel the complexity of neuroinflammation after traumatic brain injury. Dr. Jha also met with our trainees to discuss their research and with many of our faculty. We are grateful for her taking time out of her busy schedule to visit our program.