| Ph.D. (University of London) |
| PET and SPECT Development Group |
Singapore Bioimaging Consortium
Helios #01-02
11 Biopolis Way, Singapore 138667 |
| David W. Townsend is Head of PET and SPECT Development for the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium and a Professor in the Department of Diagnostic Imaging, National University Hospital. He has a Ph.D. in Particle Physics from the University of London and was a staff member for eight years at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1980, he joined the faculty of Geneva University Hospital as a physicist in the Department of Nuclear Medicine. He has worked on PET instrumentation development since the early eighties, and designed and built the first rotating partial ring PET scanner using BGO block detectors. In 1993, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as an Associate Professor of Radiology and Senior PET Physicist. He was Co-Director of the Pittsburgh PET Facility from 1996-2002, and became Professor of Radiology in 2000. In 1995, he was Principal Investigator on the first proposal to design and build a combined PET/CT scanner. The PET/CT scanner, attributed to Dr Townsend and Dr Nutt, then President of CPS Innovations, was named by TIME Magazine as the medical invention of the year 2000. In recognition of his work on PET/CT, he received the 2004 Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Academy of Molecular Imaging, and the 2008 Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award from the Austrian Society of Nuclear Medicine. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE. From 2003 to 2009, he was Professor of Medicine and Radiology, and Director of the Molecular Imaging and Translational Research Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. |
