Interview Highlights: “The Cloud” & Living Through COVID-19 Infection with J. Thomas Vaughan Jr.

Cover illustration by: Zoe Chan (CC '22)

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Interview by: Hannah Lin (CC '23)

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 J. Thomas Vaughan Jr., PhD, is Director of the Columbia Magnetic Resonance Research Center (CMRRC), Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Professor of Radiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

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The following is a heavily condensed version of the full interview. If you're interested, read more here.


Can you describe your COVID-19 research?

We have a collaboration of about 30 people—physicians, staff, faculty—across Columbia. The title of our research is COVID-19 Longitudinal Multi-ethnic Bioimaging Assessment of Cardiovascular Sequelae. Now that’s a mouthful—obviously the physicians thought that one up [laughs]. They worked hard to come up with an acronym. If you use the right letters in the right sequence, that adds up to COLUMBIA CARDS registry.

​A lot of people think of COVID by its first symptoms. But it turns out that this virus attacks every individual in a different way. These need to be studied—we don’t know anything about this aftermath of COVID that many patients have to live with and continue to recover from, so we need to first understand them before we can come up with therapies to treat them.

Specifically, we are in the early stages of putting together a body of research and collecting preliminary data to start applying for grants with the title I mentioned. We have 3 aims:

1. To assess the effect on myocardial tissue structure of COVID-19 infection in a multi-ethnic spectrum of convalescent patients (patients that are recovered) and relate structural features to patient important outcomes. 

We’ll image and compare the differences between 2 cohorts: one healthy normal group and one COVID antibody positive group. We’ll use a number of different techniques to characterize myocarditis: a viral disease of the heart and resultant heart ailments. ​

2. To assess the effect on myocardial function of COVID-19 infection in a multi-ethnic spectrum of convalescent patients and to relate functional features to the patient important outcomes. 

​In other words, we’re looking at a broad spectrum of people from different ethnic groups, walks of life, races. New York is great for these kinds of populations. ​
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3. To develop a publicly available image-driven repository of COVID survivors from the unique northern Manhattan population and develop tools for long-term infrastructure sharing and computing support. 

According to The New York Times and Google, we’re the first such biomedical imaging lab fully integrated on the Google 

Cloud Platform. Medical imaging is 90% of the data amassed from a hospital or clinic, so it requires huge amounts of archival space.

So we really have to look to the cloud, to the future, for archiving medical image data and also for looking at that data rapidly and broadly to correlate to symptoms or anything else. Data’s the oil, the gold, the currency that so many people are beginning to trade and, frankly, makes a lot more sense than dollars and gold bars—it’s more useful. It’s knowledge. 

The more data we acquire from our huge, diverse patient population, the more information we have to ask big questions about certain symptoms, therapies, or differences between racial or ethnic groups, genders, or ages. 


Are you still keeping prior projects going?

​Prior to COVID-19, we had a lot of research going; across the Columbia campus we’ve got over 120 investigators using MRI or MR in some capacity, supported with over 120 million dollars in NIH funding. Most bodies of research had to be paused just to limit the number of people coming and going in all the buildings and labs on campus. 

But there are a few studies deemed essential, such as longitudinal studies of disease progression. For example, one of them is Alzheimer’s and another is Huntington’s disease. Unfortunately, we can’t pause the progression of these diseases in patients; therefore, we can’t pause the experiments.

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You’ve had COVID-19 yourself. Can you talk about that experience? ​

​Sure. I was actually one of the earliest cases. I remember very specifically where, when, and how I got it. I was sitting on a plane out of LaGuardia, back in the cheap section, where everyone has to sit on everybody’s laps. I thought I was going to get lucky on a very crowded plane because I had a seat empty next to me, but at the last minute, this guy got on who had a very characteristic dry hack. And the whole time he was sitting there, he was coughing and had to keep getting up to go use the bathroom and having me hold his coffee cup.

So I knew I was going to get sick from something then. But at the time, frankly, it was so early—February 14th—that I thought it was a cold or flu. You know, this was back when everybody was calling this the “Democratic hoax.” Clearly, it was already alive and well in New York before February 14th; I’m proof of that.

I got home Monday night, and Tuesday morning I woke up with all the characteristic symptoms: headache, a very nonproductive dry cough, all the stomach ailments. It just felt like I’d been run over by a bus; my whole body ached. I was just thinking it was a nasty case of the flu the whole time. 

Everybody’s affected in different ways; to me, coughing was the worst part because I couldn’t go to sleep at night, my chest and diaphragm ached everytime I coughed, it was just painful. So I stayed doped up on ibuprofen, aspirin, everything else. There was some rumor going around for a while to “not take ibuprofen when you have COVID, because everybody that dies with COVID is full of ibuprofen” like there was some correlation. I’m like, the correlation is that if you’re dying of COVID, you need pain relief [laughs​]. ​

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What is your perspective on the future?

On my Facebook page (another use of the cloud by the way, since I use it to store my massive quantities of travel photos), I had a blog going. Mid-January, just from what I gleaned from the press and the talk, I said there’s this new virus that had every making of a pandemic. I don’t know how I knew that in mid-January and our president didn’t know that until mid-March, but whatever [laughs]. 

At the beginning of February,  I noted in my blog that I was very impressed with the way the world, together with the World Health Organization, was working together across borders to get a handle on this virus very quickly. I saw real cooperation and I commented on that in a very hopeful way, because on so many issues, the world doesn’t work together and can’t cooperate. 

​Unfortunately, as you see, especially in our own country, this cooperation rapidly devolved and (I’m happy to be on public record for this) because of our lousy leadership, we see an example of the human tragedy that bad leadership, a lack of coordinated government response, and a lack of international collaboration in goodwill can cause. I think we’ll be able to look back at COVID collectively and learn very important lessons across the broad spectrum of what to do and what not to do. I hope we will learn.