President of WMIS

Juri Gelovani was born in 1964 in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia and graduated a high school in 1980. In 1986, he graduated a medical school (MD) of the University of Tartu, Estonia, and pursued postgraduate training in Neurosurgery. In 1990, he defended a dual-specialty clinical research based dissertation in Neurosurgery and Neuroradiology (PhD). In 1991, he joined as a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Neurology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Gelovani’s initial work (1991-1993) was focused on imaging brain tumor proliferative activity and brain tumor gene therapy. During 1992-1993, he developed and validated the original idea for non-invasive radiotracer-based in vivo imaging of the location, magnitude, and duration of the HSV1-tk reporter/therapeutic gene in the whole body. In 1995, his paper (Cancer Res., 55:6121-6135, 1995) started the field of “molecular-genetic imaging”. Since, Dr. Gelovani has published several original papers which further expanded the spectrum of various reporter gene imaging systems and novel radiolabeled agents for PET imaging for applications in basic molecular and cell biology research, as well as in gene therapy, adoptive immunotherapy, and stem cell therapy of cancer. Dr. Gelovani has authored more than 150 papers and delivered more than invited 200 lectures, including at a prestigious Novel Symposium in 2007.

Dr. Gelovani had organized the First International Symposium on Gene Imaging and Genetic Targeting of Radiation Therapy, Halkidiki, Greece, 1998, which started the “grass roots” movement to establish the Society for Molecular-Genetic Imaging (SMI). Dr. Gelovani is one of the co-founders of SMI. In 2001, at the Inaugural Meeting of SMI in Boston, Dr. Gelovani was awarded the first Achievement Award and a Gold Medal of the SMI for significant contributions to the field of Molecular Imaging. In 2003, Dr. Gelovani joined the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX as a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Experimental Diagnostic Imaging and the Director of Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging Research (CABIR). Dr. Gelovani has fostered the development of the Federation of Asian Societies for Molecular Imaging (FASMI) in 2006 and serves as the Advisor to the Secretary General of FASMI. In 2008-2009, Dr. Gelovani served as the President of the SMI. In 2009, he was the Organizer-In-Chief of the First World Molecular Imaging Congress (WMIC) in Nice, France. In 2009, Dr. Gelovani was elected to the Academy of Molecular Imaging (AMI) Board of Directors and became a President of AMI in September of 2010. For several years Dr. Gelovani has lead the process of merger of AMI and SMI to form the World Molecular Imaging Society (WMIS). Currently, Dr. Gelovani is the President of WMIS.

R. Edward Coleman, M.D., is a Professor of Radiology and the Director of the Division of Nuclear Medicine at Duke University Medical Center.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Evansville and a medical degree from Washington University. After serving an internship at the Washington University School of Medicine and subsequent residency at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he returned to St. Louis in 1972 for a fellowship in nuclear medicine at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. After a short stent on the faculty there, he moved to the University of Utah as the Director of Nuclear Medicine. In 1979, he was appointed Professor of Radiology at Duke University Medical Center and subsequently was appointed Vice-Chairman of the Department of Radiology.

Dr. Coleman has participated in research in all aspects of nuclear medicine. He was at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in the early 1970’s and participated in the performance of the first human PET studies. He has maintained a research and clinical interest in PET since that time. He has also been involved in the development and evaluation of SPECT imaging.

Dr. Coleman was a founder and first president of the Institute of Clinical PET (ICP) and a president of the Academy of Molecular Imaging (AMI). In 2007, he was awarded the Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Pioneer Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine.

Dr. Basilion completed his BA in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and entered the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Following his graduate studies Dr. Basilion took a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NICHD) in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Branch with Dr. Richard Klausner. During his post-doctoral work he began a series of studies with investigators of the Center for Molecular Imaging Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital to exploit iron metabolism for molecular imaging. This work resulted in creation of a transgene and magnetic resonance imaging probes suitable for imaging gene transfer and changes in endogenous levels of internalizing receptors in vivo both non-invasively and in real time with MRI. In 1996 Dr. Basilion left the NIH to take a position as a Senior Scientist at a small genomics/anti-cancer biotech company. Dr. Basilion joined the Faculty of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital- Center for Molecular Imaging Research in 1999. While at MGH Dr. Basilion led a group of PhDs and physicians that were attempting to identify informative markers and molecular signatures of disease and develop imaging agents suitable to image simultaneous expression of multiple markers for breast, brain, and prostate cancers. In September 2005 Dr. Basilion joined the faculties of the Case School of Medicine and the Case School of Engineering as an Associate Professor and Director of the NFCR Center for Molecular Imaging at Case. Dr. Basilion is a member of several societies, has held several offices in the Society for Molecular Imaging, has written numerous reviews on molecular imaging and genomics and holds editorships on three imaging or imaging related journals. He is co-director of the Cancer Imaging Program at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and, most recently with a Stanford University collaborator, has co-founded Akrotome Imaging, a start-up biotech imaging company devoted to developing molecular imaging diagnostics.

An educator at Washington University in Saint Louis for the past three decades, Ackerman has trained and mentored numerous undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, many of whom now hold senior positions in academe and industry.  In addition to having oversight responsibilities for a laboratory whose members range from endowed-chair full professor to high school summer student, Ackerman’s own research efforts are broadly directed toward the development and implementation of MR imaging and spectroscopy techniques to provide a more complete understanding of the complex microstructure and governing biophysical, physiologic, and metabolic determinants of cells, tissues, and organisms in the intact, functioning state.

Chrit Moonen

Chrit Moonen did his Masters in Molecular Sciences and his Ph.D. in biophysics (Wageningen University). He did part of his studies with Nobel Laureate Wüthrich in Zürich, Switzerland. He went for a postdoctoral period to the University of Oxford (Sir Georg Radda). He then worked at the University of California at Davis as a Visiting Research Scientist before becoming head of the NIH In Vivo NMR Research Center from 1987-1996. Then he moved back to Europe (Bordeaux, France) where he is Director of Research at the “National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He was director of the laboratory “Molecular and Functional Imaging: from Physiology to Therapy” from 2003-2011. He recently joined the Division of Imaging at the University Medical Center Utrecht to develop the theme of Molecular Imaging Guided Therapies. He coauthored over 150 scientific papers. He was President of the “International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine” (2006), and of the “Society for Molecular Imaging” (2009). He received the European Magnetic Resonance Award 2000, is a Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and of the European Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology. His recent work is mainly in molecular and cellular imaging, MRI guided Focused Ultrasound, and image guided control of gene expression and drug delivery.