By: Mallory Bachmann
The 2025 Leighton E. Cluff Award for Aging Research — which recognizes research excellence and supports scholarly work in aging — has been awarded to Babak Ahmadi, a University of Florida PhD candidate in the Industrial & Systems Engineering Department, with a collaborative appointment in Neurology. Ahmadi conducts research in the Integrative Brain Research, AI & Neuroimaging (iBRAIN) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Labs at the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases and is a member of the DISIDE Lab.
This award recognizes Ahmadi’s research examining the combined effects of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Lewy body (LB) pathology on brain aging and neurodegeneration. The study uses a deep learning model trained on MRI scans from cognitively unimpaired adults to estimate “brain age,” which was then applied to cognitively impaired participants grouped by AD and LB biomarker status.
Findings indicate that individuals exhibiting both AD and LB pathology experience the greatest deviations from normal brain aging and the most rapid progression over time. These effects were accompanied by greater regional brain atrophy — particularly in memory, attention and visual processing regions — and more rapid cognitive decline compared with either pathology alone. These findings highlight the added neurodegenerative burden of Lewy body co-pathology in Alzheimer’s disease and emphasize the importance of combined biomarker-based approaches in aging and dementia research.
Ahmadi’s research integrates medical imaging and artificial intelligence to extract quantitative markers of neurodegeneration from complex neuroimaging data. Using AI at scale, his work converts complex imaging data into reliable, clinically meaningful measures of brain health.
“This shift allows us to answer questions in living patients about how departures from normal aging emerge, how different neurodegenerative pathologies relate to brain aging, and how those patterns map onto cognitive change — while still retaining interpretability about which brain regions are driving the signal,” he said.
This research was supported by The Fixel-Wilder Pilot Grant Program, which funds projects in Alzheimer’s, tau and amyloid research, made possible by the B.J. and Eve Wilder Family Foundation in collaboration with the Fixel Institute.
“The Wilder family’s support provided the essential resources needed to pursue this work at the intersection of medical imaging, artificial intelligence, and brain health research,” Ahmadi said. “It enabled advanced computational analysis of large-scale neuroimaging data and the translation of those findings into clinically meaningful insights for aging and neurodegenerative disease.”
Ahmadi also expresses deep gratitude to his mentors and co-investigators — Dr. Abbas Babajani-Feremi, Dr. Mostafa Reisi-Gahrooei and Dr. Melissa Armstrong.
“Their guidance has helped me grow as an independent researcher — strengthening my technical rigor while keeping the work grounded in clinically meaningful questions in aging and neuroscience,” he said.