2018 Distinguished Investigators

The Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research is pleased to announce that 42 researchers have been selected to receive the Academy’s 2018 Distinguished Investigator Award. This prestigious honor recognizes individuals for their accomplishments in the field of medical imaging. Please join us in congratulating the following individuals:
Dr. Duong’s translational research programs focus on the development and application of novel MRI methods in animals and humans to improve health. Dr. Duong has contributed to the better understanding the spatial specificity and signal sources of fMRI methods to map brain function, novel imaging methods to detect retinal diseases in the early stages, prior to the onset of clinical symptoms, and longitudinally monitor disease progression and treatment responses, and novel imaging methods to detect stroke early, distinguish salvageable versus non-salvageable tissue, longitudinally monitor ischemic progression and treatment responses. His research has the potential to improve treatment outcomes and quality of life.
Dr. Moonsoo’s earlier work has focused on developing biomolecules for therapy and imaging applications. This was demonstrated by engineering of high affinity variants of native proteins, which was found to be a potent antagonist to T cell adherence to and subsequent migration through endothelial cells. His recent work has focused on applying molecular engineering to program T cells for cancer therapy. This was achieved by introducing chimeric antigen receptors or other cell signaling pathways to T cells. I developed SSTR2 as an imaging reporter for T cells for specific and sensitive imaging of adoptively transferred T cells.
Longitudinally imaging healthy children starting from birth, Lin lab has uncovered brain functional and structural development in early infancy. A primitive and incomplete default mode network (DMN) is present in 2-week-olds, followed by a rapid maturation in year 1. By two-years-old, DMN becomes similar to that observed in adults. His team further investigated temporal development of language development and reported that language lateralization starts at 2-year-old. Finally, a novel approach to reveal brain oxygen metabolism using MRI was developed by Dr. Lin, which has been demonstrated effective in the management of acute stroke patients.
Dr. Lui is a neuroimaging expert leading a federally-funded, translational research team at the forefront of discovering the biological underpinnings of traumatic brain injury using MRI. Her contribution comprises some of the seminal works in the field: to understand tissue microstructure, metabolism, and functional alterations after concussion. Yvonne also seeks to better understand the complex relationships between brain structure and function which lie at the core of human experience. Recent works describe tissue microstructure and working memory and offer a novel casting of an advanced fMRI model of brain causal architecture as a special form of a recurrent neural network.