Illinois-MGH molecular imaging seminar series presents fall lectures

NPRE and several other University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign units will continue collabrations with the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Radiology and Center for Advanced Medical Imaging Sciences as fall lectures begin this week. Dr. Neil Vasdev will discuss “Cutting-edge radiochemical methods and technologies for human PET imaging” at noon on Friday, November 13, in Room 1005 of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Vasdev is the director of Radiochemistry at Massachusetts General Hospital and is an associate professor in the Department of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. His independent radiopharmaceutical chemistry research on developing radiolabelled imaging agents, often by multi-step radiochemistry reactions, is used for investigating disorders of the human brain. He has applied this technology to prepare cancer and cardiac imaging agents.
 

Dr. Marc Normandin, assistant professor, Harvard Medical School, and assistant in physics, Massachusetts General Hospital will present at noon, Friday, November 20, in Room 1005, Beckman. His talk, "Mapping neurotransmitter signaling with PET and fMRI," will review progress over the past decade developing PET pharmacokinetic modeling techniques that extract information about the time course of neurotransmitter levels. He will present a recently conceived framework for interpreting CBV-weighted fMRI in terms of the dynamics of underling n eurochemical signaling. Furthermore, Normandin will describe an integrated PET/fMRI kinetic modeling approach that takes advantage of simultaneous multimodal data acquisition that is possible due to the recent advent of hybrid PET/MR scanners.
 
Dr. Charalambos Kaittanis will discuss, “Nanotechnology-based Approaches for Imaging and Therapy” at noon, Friday, December 4, in Room 1005, Beckman. Kaittanis is an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School and assistant chemist in the Department of Radiology at MGH, focusing on the development of imaging platforms that guide therapy in oncology and brain disorders.
 
The Illinois-MGH Molecular Imaging Seminar Series highlights the collaboration through a series of seminars provided by experts in their disciplines. Lunch will be served. The talk is free and open to the public.