Founders
Prof. Jo Hajnal
Jo Hajnal is Head of the Imaging Physics and Engineering Group, Head of the Robert Steiner MR Unit and of the Imaging Sciences Department at the Hammersmith Hospital Campus of Imperial College, as well as Chairman of the In Vivo Imaging Section of the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, a UK national research institute dedicated to integrating basic with Clinical Science. He trained as a physicist at Bristol University, England, UK and obtained a PhD in the physics of electromagnetic waves before working in Australia at Melbourne University and the ANU on interactions between atomic beams and laser light. In 1990 he began research in medical imaging with a special interest in MRI. His current research interests include MR data acquisition and processing, image registration and data fusion as well as novel scanner technology, parallel imaging and motion artefact correction. He has invented and pioneered techniques that are now widely used in the medical imaging industry, published over a hundred papers in peer reviewed journals and is currently holder of nine grants from a variety of funding organisations. He is a member of the board of the international Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Prof. David Hawkes
Dave Hawkes has 28 years' experience in medical imaging, working in both hospital and academic environments. He graduated in Natural Sciences (Physics) from Oxford in 1974 and obtained his PhD in X-ray computed tomography in 1981. He has worked at Southampton General Hospital, Surrey University, the Royal Marsden Hospital and St. George's Hospital, London, before moving to Guy's Hospital. Following the restructuring of the KCL School of Medicine in August 2002, he became Chairman of the new Division of Imaging Sciences. Since January 2005, he has been Director of the Centre for Medical Image Computing (MedIC) at University College London. His current research interests encompass image matching, data fusion, visualisation, shape representation, surface geometry and modelling tissue deformation with applications in medical image analysis and image guided interventions. He is Director of the EPSRC and MRC funded Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration on Medical Images and Signals (MIAS-IRC), an £8M six year programme. He is also principal investigator of four EPSRC funded projects, one CRUK project and manager of three industrially sponsored projects. He has 180 publications in medical imaging.
Prof. Derek Hill
Derek Hill is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of IXICO. He founded IXICO to bring the best possible imaging technology and know-how to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Derek also holds an academic appointment as Full Professor at University College London. He took a BSc degree in Physics at Imperial College, an MSc in Medical Physics at University of Surrey, a PhD in medical image analysis at the Medical School of Guy's & St Thomas' Hospitals, University of London, and business training at the London Business School through the CSEL programme. He was appointed a lecturer (assistant professor) in 1995. He was appointed full professor in September 2004, shortly before co-founding IXICO. He has been working on medical image analysis for nearly 20 years, and has authored more than 60 journal papers in this field. His research track record includes image acquisition and analysis, image acquisition and analysis for drug discovery and development, other aspects of image acquisition including motion correction and partially parallel imaging in MRI and motion compensation in PET. He has worked on applications in the study of dementia, heart disease, arthritis, oncology and guiding interventions. Much of this work was in collaboration with the medical imaging, medical device and pharmaceutical industries. He is a member of the MRI Core of the ADNI project, is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, and is a member of the ISMRM safety committee and the ISMRM Ad Hoc Committee on Standards for Quantitative MR.
Prof. Daniel Rueckert
Daniel Rueckert joined the Department of Computing at Imperial College as a lecturer in 1999 and became a Professor in 2005. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College in 1997. Before joining the VIP group, he worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Division of Radiological Sciences and Medical Engineering, King's College London in the EPSRC-funded project "Application of information theory for medical image matching" for use in computer assisted interventions, navigation and surgery. During his doctoral and post-doctoral research he published more than 60 journal and conference articles. Prof. Rueckert has served as guest editor for a special issue of IEEE Transaction on Medical Imaging on 3D cardiac image analysis and as a referee for a number of international journals and conferences on medical imaging. He is currently principal investigator in three EPSRC projects in the area of medical imaging.