Joelle K. Barral , PhD

Engineer
Life Sciences
Google
Mountain View, California

2010-11 Stertzer Fellow
Joelle did her undergraduate studies at Ecole Polytechnique, France. In 2001-2002, she was Officer of the Deck with the French Navy in the Indian Ocean. From 2002 to 2004, her academic curriculum spanned a wide range of scientific areas and she majored in Physics. She conducted research in optics and was for three months a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, designing and testing photodetectors for application in astrophysics and Positron Emission Tomography. She also spent a summer in Siberia learning Russian. She graduated with a B.S. in 2004 and moved to California to continue her studies at Stanford University. In Summer 2005, she was an intern at General Electric Global Research Center, NY, developing algorithms to remove metal artifacts from Computed Tomography images. She obtained her M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2006.

Joelle completed her Ph.D. dissertation in Electrical Engineering as well as her M.A. thesis in Slavic Languages and Literatures, both at Stanford University, in 2010. Her Ph.D. work aimed at making high-resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) clinically viable: she designed and built new RF arrays, developed pulse sequences to image at high field strengths, and proposed innovative motion-correction algorithms. Her research efforts were applied to skin imaging for patients with Peripheral Arterial Disease or diabetes and larynx imaging, where high-resolution MRI allows the delineation of thyroidal cartilage that is critical for accurate cancer staging and optimal therapy planning. She consulted for several start-ups, including MicroMRI, to visualize bone micro-architecture in osteoporotic patients, and PharmaJet, to deliver vaccines and drugs without needles.

After the fellowship, Dr. Barral spent a few years at HeartVista, Inc., a start-up company located in the Bay Area pursuing innovative techniques for cardiovascular MR imaging. She then joined Google[x] Life Sciences in 2014.