The National Science Foundation Office of Integrative Activities awarded a $231,682 Project Grant to the University of Alabama under the Integrative Activities federal grant program (CFDA 47.083) to develop an aberration-free computational framework for transcranial photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) brain imaging. Over the two year period from January 2023 to December 2024, a faculty fellow and graduate student will work with experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to mathematically model skull distortions in PACT imaging and create high-performance computing software to enable distortion-free reconstruction of brain tissue. This work aims to advance the state of the art in transcranial PACT by deriving reconstruction algorithms using adjoint methods and spectral element modeling of skull acoustics. The results are expected to significantly improve PACT imaging for medical and research applications involving the brain.