Dr. Rudolph Pienaar completed a Bachelors and Masters in Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. He also holds a Doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Cleveland State University/Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where he conducted research in Reinforcement Learning applied to musculo-skeletal bio-mechanical control systems. He completed postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was an assistant in Medical Imaging. He is currently faculty in Radiology at Boston Children's Hospital and an assistant professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School. 

Dr. Pienaar's research interests include brain surface feature analysis, tractography-from-an-informatics perspective, cloud computing, image visualization, and system design. At the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Boston Children's Hospital, he leads the Advanced Computing Group, responsible for the developing new informatics infrastructure solutions to clinical problems. He is the main technical lead on ChRIS.