College of Engineering 50th Anniversary
To celebrate the College of Engineering’s Golden 50th Anniversary in 2012, a series of events are planned on the Davis campus and in the Bay Area. Exhibitions at UC Davis, website features, and special events will celebrate the first 50 years of the College of Engineering, and enlarge the vision for our success in the next half-century.
College of Engineering Notable Biographies
SIMON CHERRY
Some races for technological development result in a dead heat.
In March 2008, UC Davis biomedical engineering professor Simon Cherry and his research team successfully created a combination PET-MRI scanner that greatly improved upon the diagnostic capabilities of the two independent machines. MRI scans provide exquisite structural detail but little functional information, while PET scans — which follow a radioactive tracer in the body — can sh
ow body processes but not structures. Cherry's lab built the scanner for studies with laboratory mice for cancer research.
Using tumors as but one example, the combo scanner's MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) capabilities could find a tumor hidden in tissue, while the PET (positron emission tomography) scanner then could determine whether the tumor was malignant and growing.
Mere weeks later, scientists at Germany's University of Tübingen announced their independent development of a similar combo scanner.
Cherry magnanimously declared this particular race a tie.
Cherry obtained a degree in physics with astronomy from University College London, and a Ph.D. in medical physics from the University of London's Institute of Cancer Research. He joined the UCLA Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology in 1993, and became the associate director of the UCLA Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging from 1998 to 2001. He joined the UC Davis faculty that same year, becoming a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging. He subsequently served as chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering from 2007 to '09.
His reach has become international; his busy publication schedule has included more than three dozen articles — over the course of 22 years — for Physics in Medicine and Biology, one of the top-ranked biomedical engineering journals. In part because of these many contributions, and also because of his eight years on the journal's editorial board, in October 2011 Cherry was appointed editor-in-chief of the publication: a position he assumed in January 2012. Cherry will become the journal's first U.S.-based editor, and Physics in Medicine and Biology will become the second top-ranked biomedical engineering journal "housed" in the UC Davis Biomedical Engineering Department (along with Annals of Biomedical Engineering, whose editor-in-chief is department chair Kyriacos Athanasiou).
For more information on the College of Engineering's 50th Anniversary Celebration, please email Oliver Ramsey.