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Chair of Excellence in Neuroimaging |
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The Chair of Excellence in Neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging was selected in April 2008 by the Neurodis Foundation Steering Committee as an objective for the first Chair of Excellence created by the foundation.
By creating a chair of excellence in neuroimaging, the aim of the Neurodis Foundation is to enhance the performances of regional forces in positron emission tomography (PET) neurotransmission imaging. Another goal of this chair is to bring upstream innovations closer to diagnostic applications of PET and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
The chair of neuroimaging will develop projects on the target pathologies of the foundation, in which clinical disorders are directly linked to a neurochemical dysfunction of interneuron transmission (ie: epilepsy, pain, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and schrizophrenia).
Following an international call for offer published in April 2008, Neurodis decided to recruit on a five-year contract Prof Alexander Hammers (German nationality), a Senior Lecturer at the Imperial College London and Head of the PET and Epilepsy research group in the MRC Centre at Hammersmith Hospital. Prof Hammers has come to France along with his colleague Dr Rolf A. Heckemann (German nationality) who worked with him in London and is also recruited on a five-year contract as a Research associate to the chair of neuroimaging.
Both of them settled in Lyon with their family in July 2009 and have been working for Neurodis since September 2009.
Alexander HAMMERS
Professor Alexander Hammers, a Neurologist, has taken up the Chair of Excellence in Functional Neuroimaging at the Neurodis Foundation in Lyon, France, in July 2009. He is a Visiting Reader in the Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, and Honorary Reader with the Institute of Neurology, UCL, London. His clinical subspecialty is Epilepsy.
After studies in Germany, France and Britain, he obtained a summa cum laude degree in Romance languages and literature in 1993 and qualified summa cum laude as a doctor at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen in 1994. He undertook postgraduate training at the Centre Hospitalier de la Côte Basque in Bayonne/Biarritz, France, the University Hospital in Essen, Germany, the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, and Charing Cross Hospital, London, UK. He has been on the GMC Specialist Register for Neurology since 2004.
He earned an MD from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen in 1999 for morphological studies of the hippocampus in health and schizophrenia (work under Dr Klaus Niemann), and a PhD from the University of London in 2002 for PET investigations in focal epilepsy undertaken under Prof John S Duncan.
He is affiliated with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Neurologie, the Association of British Neurologists, the British Branch of the International League Against Epilepsy, and the American Academy of Neurology.
Awards and distinctions include a Scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (1989-1994), the Intercapital Prize in Epileptology 2002, and an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship (2004-2009).
His research has focussed on structural neuroimaging (magnetic resonance imaging, MRI) and functional neuroimaging (positron emission tomography, PET) of the epilepsies, and the development of new methodologies to quantify and compare neurotransmitter receptor concentrations, particularly automated volume-of-interest analysis. The goal is to understand both the structural basis as well as the pathophysiology of epilepsy and other neurological diseases, and to apply this knowledge clinically, particularly in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy.
His work at the Neurodis Foundation will strive to use neuroscientific methods for the benefit of individual patients. The main functional neuroimaging techniques used will be PET and MRI. While his main research focus will remain in the epilepsies, many of the methods lend themselves to being used in other diseases, for example diagnosis and follow-up of dementing diseases, and he expects to collaborate widely with Neurodis partners in Lyon, Grenoble, Saint-Etienne and Clermond-Ferrand, as well as pursuing existing and new national and international collaborations. He will aim to integrate PET, MRI, SPECT and MEG in the presurgical work-up of focal epilepsies, and will actively pursue research into novel PET tracers and optimimal use of existing PET tracers.
Beside his clinical and research activities, Dr Hammers participates in regular student supervision and teaching, dissemination of knowledge through invited talks and workshops, and reviewer work for numerous journals and grant giving bodies.
Rolf A. HECKEMANN
Dr. Rolf A. Heckemann is a Research Associate with the Neurodis Foundation and Honorary Fellow with the Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London.
After studying in Germany, Scotland and Canada and qualifying as a medical practitioner at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany in 1995, he conducted research at the Universität Essen and obtained the title of Doctor of Medicine cum laude working on diagnostic and interventional ultrasound of the chest in 1997. Following completion of postgraduate clinical training in Scotland and London, he worked on digital imaging and image processing for diagnostic and teaching applications under supervision of Prof. David Cosgrove at Hammersmith Hospital, London.
In 2007, he was awarded a PhD in Medical Imaging for his work under Prof. Joseph V. Hajnal on automatic segmentation of magnetic resonance brain images. His activity at the Neurodis Foundation, which he joined in September 2009, continues to be dedicated to automatic morphometry of the human brain. The objective is to identify imaging biomarkers that will enable more sensitive and more specific diagnoses in the earliest stages of neurodegenerative disease.
Dr. Heckemann is affiliated with the Radiological Society of North America and the New York Academy of Sciences. He serves on the review boards of various journals of neuroimaging and adjoined fields. He maintains numerous international research collaborations and is active in the teaching and mentoring of research students.
Josiane YANKAM NJIWA
After studying electrical engineering, Dr. Josiane YANKAM NJIWA took interest in medical imaging and obtained her PhD in image processing at the research centre CREATIS-LRMN at INSA of Lyon, under the supervision of Dr. Yuemin ZHU (CNRS Research Director). During this period she developed reconstruction methods that reduce the acquisition time of static as well as dynamic magnetic resonance images (MRI). Josiane obtained her PhD in October 2007.
From December 2007 to January 2011, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) under the supervision of Dr. Markus RUDIN. During this period, Josiane specialized in biomedical engineering with a focus on small animal imaging. She developed methods for processing spinal cord and brain images to enhance their analysis and interpretation (fusion, registration, segmentation, and related techniques). She proposed and implemented image reconstruction algorithms to accelerate the acquisition of brain images.
Josiane’s great interest in functional imaging and neuroscience led her to join the research team of the Neurodis Chair of Excellence in Functional Neuroimaging as a post-doctoral fellow. Her research here is focused on the use of PET with the radiotracer [11C]PK11195 to detect and quantify inflammation of the brain in patients with autoimmune disease and/or epilepsy.