Robert Smith - Facility Fellow at Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

Robert Smith

Facility Fellow at Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

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Summary

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Senior

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Top School

Robert Smith is a Facility Fellow at the Australian National Imaging Facility and the lead developer of MRtrix3, an influential open-source toolkit for advanced diffusion MRI analysis used worldwide. With 15 years of experience bridging neuroimaging research and software engineering, he develops novel image-processing, tractography and statistical inference methods and supports Siemens 3T scanner protocols at the Melbourne Brain Centre. His work—spanning a PhD in neuroimaging, postdoctoral research on fixel-based analysis, and a research fellowship at Siemens Healthineers—focuses on making diffusion MRI tractography biologically meaningful and reproducible. An active maintainer on the MRtrix3 GitHub project, he contributes both core algorithmic improvements and user-facing tooling, including nuanced enhancements to tensor estimation and single-shell volume selection logic. Notably, he pairs deep academic insight with practical scanner-facing protocol development, ensuring methods translate from theory into routine imaging workflows.

15 years of coding experience

VCE, English, Mathematical Methods, Specialist Mathematics, Physics, Information Technology, Biology, VCE, English, Mathematical Methods, Specialist Mathematics, Physics, Information Technology, Biology at University High School

Certificate III, Information Technology, Certificate III, Information Technology at RMIT TAFE

The University of Melbourne

Bachelor, Applied Physics & Electronic Engineering, Bachelor, Applied Physics & Electronic Engineering at RMIT University

Github Skills (6)

c-language10

cprogramming-language10

diffusion-mri10

image-processing10

command-line-interface9

algorithms9

Programming languages (10)

TypeScriptDockerfileC++ShellSCSSJavaScriptHTMLMATLAB

Github contributions (5)

MRtrix3/mrtrix3

Jul 2010 - Jan 2023

MRtrix3 provides a set of tools to perform various advanced diffusion MRI analyses, including constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD), probabilistic tractography, track-density imaging, and apparent fibre density

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:3 releases, 232 reviews, 3936 commits in 12 years 8 months

Contributions summary:Robert focused on enhancing the descriptions of the dwi2tensor command by providing more verbose help information. They also modified the code of the dwi2tensor command to show the output values, and the code related to the test for the constraints that will permit the reorientation of gradient directions to be applied. The user also restored the option to perform a test for this same command. Additionally, the user modified the logic for selecting the first volume in a single shell acquisition, with a new method that is applicable to all algorithms.

analysesdeconvolutionmrifibreimaging

bids-apps/MRtrix3_connectome

Aug 2016 - Dec 2022

Generate subject connectomes from raw image data and perform inter-subject connection density normalisation, using tools provided in the MRtrix3 software package.

Contributions:1 release, 356 commits, 57 PRs in 6 years 5 months

interconnectionhistopathologyimage-dataneuroimaging

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