Jan Valosek, PhD
🧠 I am a neuroscientist and biomedical engineer with a multidisciplinary research and clinical background. My main interests include spinal cord and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), deep learning, and open-source software development.
🧲 I am currently a postdoctoral researcher (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship; see Credits) at Palacký University Olomouc. My research focuses on developing automatic and reproducible analysis tools for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans using machine learning and deep learning methods. See this page for more details.
👨🔬 Previously, I spent 2.5 years as a postdoctoral researcher at the NeuroPoly Lab at Polytechnique Montréal and Mila – Quebec AI Institute in Canada, where I focused on spinal cord MRI segmentation using deep learning methods.
💻 As a member of the Spinal Cord Toolbox (SCT) team, I maintain and develop a free and open-source software tool dedicated to the processing and analysis of spinal cord MRI data.
🎓 During my PhD, I worked on the application of advanced diffusion MRI in patients with spinal cord compression and its relationship with electrophysiological findings; for details, see here.
🏥 In addition to my research, I worked for 6.5 years as a biomedical engineer at the Department of Neurosurgery and the Department of Neurology at University Hospital Olomouc. I processed presurgical examinations (functional MRI and tractography) of patients with brain tumours and provided technical support during brain and spine surgeries.
Research Interests
- Spinal cord and brain MRI
- Deep learning applied to medical imaging
- MRI data curation, annotation, and management
- Open-source image analysis software development
Professional experience
Postdoctoral Researcher
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia
05/2025 - present
Postdoctoral Researcher
NeuroPoly lab, Institute of Biomedical Engineering
Polytechnique Montreal, QC, Canada
11/2022 - 04/2025
Research Associate
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia
04/2016 - Apr 2023
Biomedical engineer
Department of biomedical engineering
University Hospital Olomouc, Czechia
03/2016 - 10/2022
Education
PhD, Neurosciences
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia
2017 - 2022
BSc and Msc, Biomedical Engineering
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Technical University of Ostrava, Czechia
2012 - 2017
Credits
My Postdoctoral Fellowship is funded from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101107932.
My research internship at Medical University of Vienna, Austria in 2021 was funded by the "Aktion Österreich-Tschechien, AÖCZ-Semesterstipendien" scholarship MPC-2020-00013 from the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research (OeAD-GmbH), Mobility Programmes, Bilateral and Multilateral Cooperation (MPC) financed by Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) of Austria.
