The focus of Dr. Gollub’s research is at the interface between the technological advancement of neuroimaging acquisition and analysis methods and their application to basic and clinical neuroscience. One of the first investigators to use fMRI to study healthy and disordered human brains, she has contributed to the development and dissemination of best practices for using those technologies through publication of exemplar research studies conducted with collaborators in multiple domains. Studies originating in her lab have used multimodal magnetic resonance neuroimaging acquisitions, including BOLD fMRI, ASL, diffusion and structural scans, to investigate pain and modulation of pain by placebo and integrative medical treatments in healthy subjects and in patients suffering from chronic pain disorders.
Dr. Gollub also has an active research program in the domain of neuroimaging informatics that focuses on the within- and cross-site calibration and validation of neuroimaging data vital to the development of viable biomarkers as well as on technical and logistical efforts to aggregate large datasets for research. She has made multiple contributions including as site PI for a publicly available multi-site clinical imaging investigation of schizophrenia and as a co-developer of the Medical Imaging Informatics Bench to Bedside (mi2b2) workbench that enables images acquired during the conduct of clinical care to be used for secondary research purposes. This unique resource for accessing clinical images is integrated directly into the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR) at Partners Healthcare institutions. She currently has several projects underway using mi2b2 acquired images for the study of MRI metrics of healthy brain development and detection of neonatal brain damage.