This is the Podcast of the European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI).
Join us as we delve into the recent literature, and perhaps learn a little from the minds that have shaped the field.
The premise is really simple: Each time we invite one senior academic to discuss their favourite publication from the recent literature. We’ll find out what caught their eye, and why it is worth taking a closer look at this particular publication. Along the way, we will learn their publication strategies and possibly even glimpse into the future of this amazing field of research.
Music “In this Life”, Composer: Guido Jäger, Musicians: Andreas Jacobs – violin, Jacob Niller – accordion, Wolfgang Platen – contrabass
Giannis is a Principal Researcher at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser – Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH – IESL) in Heraklion, Crete and the Head of the Laboratory for Biophotonics and Molecular Imaging. Giannis had been elected as ESMI Vice President in 2018 and served as President from 2019 to 2020.
Tim is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at King’s College London’s School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences. His Group’s research focuses on the development of next-generation imaging tools for cancer diagnosis, monitoring of therapeutic response, and detection of drug resistance. Tim has been serving as member of the ESMI Board since 2018.
John is the Director of the Imaging Laboratories at the Robarts Research Institute, Director of the Translational Immune-Oncology Research Group at the Centre for Translational Cancer Research, and an Associate Professor in Medical Biophysics at The University of Western Ontario in Canada.
He completed his PhD at Western before moving to Stanford University in the lab of Sam Gambhir on a postdoctoral fellowship. After an incredibly successful postdoc in California, working with some amazing scientists, I might add, he returned to Western in 2015 to set up his group. Here, they combine advances in molecular and synthetic biology with a multimodal imaging perspective to build new tools for early detection and treatment of cancer, as well as non-invasive monitoring of cell, gene and genome therapies.
Markita is an Associate Professor Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering & Neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
The Landry Lab’s work develops synthetic bio-mimetic nanocomposites to impart control over nanomaterial interactions with biological systems.
Markita earned her bachelor’s degrees at the University of North Carolina, where she majored in both chemistry and physics. She moved to the University of Illinois for doctoral studies and earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics. Markita was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral scholar at MIT and performed research at both the Technical University of Munich and Osaka University.
In 2016, she was appointed to the faculty at Berkeley. She heads the Landry Lab on Optical Nanomaterials & Single-Molecule Research Group.
Vasilis is a Full Professor of Medicine and Electrical Engineering and holds the Chair of Biological Imaging at the Technical University of Munich. He is the Director of the Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and Director of Bioengineering at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus. He was briefly the director of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser of the Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas, but more on that later in our discussion. He is also a founding member and board member of the translational oncology center TranslaTUM and the Speaker of the Study Program of the Munich School of Bioengineering. For his work he has been awarded several prestigious awards, including the 2013 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation, the German innovation Prize and many others.