Carissa Rodriguez graduated from Wittenberg University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics. She entered the Bioengineering program at the University of California Riverside in 2010 and joined the Neuroscience and Optical Imaging Research lab under the direction of Dr. Hyle Park. She worked in collaboration with Dr. Devin Binder's lab to develop a method for spatially resolved optical detection of cerebral edema, a condition that typically occurs due to pathologies such as traumatic brain injury and stroke using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Using the OCT image data she was able to extract optical properties of the tissue and spatially resolve areas in the brain that show a change due to the presence of edema. 

Carissa recieved her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Califronia Riverside in 2015. 
Link to Carissa's Ph.D. Dissertation