The Secret Lives of Scientists: Anastasia Yendiki

Anastasia Yendiki on image analysis algorithms and dancing flamenco

The Martinos Center is spilling over with talent, attracting many of the brightest minds from around the world. But the talent isn’t limited to building radiofrequency coils and developing novel pulse sequences for acquisition of MR data.

Anastasia Yendiki is a researcher who focuses on methods for mapping the circuitry of the human brain. At the Martinos Center, she develops robust data analysis methods for diffusion MRI. Her tractography toolbox, TRACULA, is distributed publicly as part of the FreeSurfer software package and used by dozens of labs worldwide to study how brain pathways are affected by disease.

Yendiki is also a flamenco dancer.

She started learning the form in the late 2000s. While attending an MIT journal club one day, she met Lauren O’Donnell, a diffusion MRI researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. O’Donnell had recently spent a year in Spain doing advanced study of flamenco and was now teaching a class of her own. Yendiki signed up for the class, absorbing all she could about the dance and putting it into practice. Two years after she started attending, she was asked to join the “Flamenco Boston” performing group.

While there is much to enjoy about Flamenco, she says, she was especially drawn to the synergistic aspect of the form. There is no designated leader or follower but rather a guitarist, singer and dancer exchanging cues and taking turns leading and following. Flamenco uses a set of musical modes, each with its own structure and mood. The performers generally improvise, but always within the constraints defined by these modes. This enables the music and the dance to flow as if one.

Anastasia Yendiki, neuroscientist and flamenco dancer

Photo by Feda Eid

She was also won over by the full range of emotions expressed in—and accepted by—flamenco.

“There is a dance for everything, from exuberance to devastation,” she says. “It is a space where you can express any of these emotions—in public, no less—and still be strong. You are being strong not by suppressing the emotion, but by experiencing it fully. You are being strong by baring your soul, not by concealing it. There is no deception in flamenco.”

Dance and science may seem like unrelated pursuits, appealing to contrasting sides of a performer’s personality. Not so, says Yendiki.

“There is an analytical aspect to flamenco that would appeal to an engineer like myself. You have a set of constraints and within those you are trying to come up with something that is creative, elegant and effective.”

“In that sense,” she says, “it has much in common with designing image analysis algorithms, doesn’t it?”

Brain pathways reconstructed automatically with the TRACULA toolbox from an in vivo diffusion MRI scan.