About

Dr. Samson Jarso is a biomedical engineer, imaging scientist, and educator whose work focuses on developing practical technologies and decision-support tools for cancer care in low-resource settings. His research integrates biomedical engineering design, quantitative imaging, and computational modeling to address challenges in diagnosis, screening, and disease monitoring where clinical infrastructure and resources are limited.

Clinical Decision Support for Cancer Care
He develops decision-support tools and risk models to improve cancer diagnosis, screening, and monitoring in low-resource settings.

Biomedical Engineering Design
His engineering work focuses on building affordable, context-appropriate devices that respond to real clinical needs in under-resourced environments.

Quantitative Imaging and Feature Discovery
He studies clinical and cellular imaging features, feature selection, and multimodal biomarker discovery to support more informed and clinically actionable decision making.

Dr. Jarso’s academic training is grounded in physics, biophysics, and imaging science. He earned a B.S. in Physics from Georgetown University, an M.S. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He later completed postdoctoral training at the F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging at Johns Hopkins University.

This interdisciplinary foundation continues to shape his work, combining quantitative rigor, imaging science, engineering design, and clinically grounded problem solving.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Jarso’s research included MRI radiofrequency coil design, functional MRI studies of stroke patients, metabolic studies using high-resolution magic angle spinning NMR, and imaging-based approaches to tumor characterization.

Across these areas, a consistent theme has been the use of advanced measurement, imaging, and analysis methods to extract clinically meaningful information from complex biological systems.

A major dimension of Dr. Jarso’s work has been his long-term engagement in Uganda and East Africa. Through research collaboration, engineering education, and capacity-building efforts, he has worked to strengthen the relationship between biomedical innovation and local clinical need.

His global health work reflects a commitment to context-driven design, sustainable innovation, and partnership-based approaches to engineering in medicine.

Dr. Jarso’s teaching emphasizes biomedical engineering design, quantitative reasoning, and clinically grounded problem solving. He aims to help students connect engineering methods to real-world health challenges, especially in low-resource settings, by developing their ability to move from needs identification and problem definition to practical design, analysis, and translational thinking.

Across mentoring, independent study supervision, and formal instruction, he encourages students to build strong technical skills while also learning to think carefully about clinical context, implementation constraints, and the broader human impact of biomedical innovation.