(in alphabetical order)
Simon R. Cherry (University of California, USA)
Simon R. Cherry, Ph.D. is Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology at the University of California, Davis. His research interests center around biomedical imaging and in particular the development and application of in vivo molecular imaging systems. His early accomplishments were in developing and applying high resolution systems for positron emission tomography (PET), in particular the microPET technology that was subsequently widely adopted in academia and industry. He has contributed to the development of high performance detectors for PET, and to multimodality imaging systems, for example first demonstrations of hybrid PET/MRI systems. He currently co-leads the EXPLORER project which aims to develop the world’s first total-body PET/CT scanner. His laboratory also developed the concept of Cerenkov luminescence imaging as an innovative way to image beta-emitting radionuclides non-invasively using sensitive optical cameras and is currently exploring the use of Cerenkov radiation as an internal light source for phototherapy and for fast timing in PET. The technologies developed by his laboratory have been broadly applied in biomedical science to study diseases processes and measure the effects of therapeutic interventions. Dr. Cherry also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology and is lead author of the widely-used textbook Physics in Nuclear Medicine.
Jeffrey S. Hangst (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Jeffrey S. Hangst is a graduate of MIT and of the University of Chicago. He worked at Fermilab and at Argonne while doing his PhD at Chicago. He moved to Aarhus University in Denmark in 1993 and has been there since. Hangst received the European Physical Society's 1996 accelerator award for a young scientist for his work on laser cooling of stored ion beams in the ASTRID storage ring in Aarhus. He has been stationed at CERN full-time since 2001. He is a founding member of the ATHENA antihydrogen collaboration and was the Physics Coordinator of the experiment that produced the first cold antihydrogen atoms at the CERN Antiproton Decelerator (AD) in 2002. This breakthrough was featured on the front page of the New York Times. He is the founder and Spokesperson of the ALPHA collaboration, which demonstrated trapping of antihydrogen atoms in 2010, and the first laser spectroscopy of antihydrogen in 2016. ALPHA’s trapping of antihydrogen was voted ‘Physics Breakthrough of the Year’ by Physics World magazine in 2010. Hangst was elected to fellowship of the American Physical Society, Division of Plasma Physics, in 2005. He received the John Dawson award for excellence in plasma physics from the APS in 2011, and the Ångstrom medal from Uppsala University in 2013 for his work on trapped antihydrogen. He currently holds two prestigious Semper Ardens grants from the Carlsberg Foundation to pursue work on gravitational studies and spectroscopy with antimatter, and he is a previous holder of an Advanced Grant from the ERC. ALPHA is the only experiment to trap antihydrogen and measure its properties, and the collaboration will begin gravitational studies of antimatter with the new ALPHA-g machine in 2021.
Beatrix Hiesmayr (University of Vienna, Austria)
Beatrix C. Hiesmayr is currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of Vienna. Her research centered on entanglement of systems encountered in high-energy physics. Her first achievements were to bring the quantum information theoretic perspective to quantum systems usually investigated at accelerator facilities such as DAPHNE, KEK or CERN and by that initiating a new field. Since 2016 she joined the J-PET collaboration lead by Pawel Moskal where she focusses on revealing the entanglement features of two and three gamma events resulting from the positronium decay and how they will relate to biological markers. For her achievements in the field of entanglement phenomena at high and low energies, she was awarded six prizes including the most prestigious Victor HESS prize of the Austrian Physical Society. She has been elected chairperson of the “ committee of nuclear and particle physics FAKT” of the Austrian Physical Society, elected deputy spokesperson of the Particle Physics Group of the University of Vienna and elected spokesperson of the “Mittelbau” of the Faculty of Physics (since 2016).
Magdalena Kowalska (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Magdalena Kowalska graduated in physics in Poznań, Poland. After staying in Lille and Hannover, she started PhD studies at the Mainz University dedicated to laser spectroscopy of unstable nuclei at the ISOLDE Radioactive Ion Beam facility of CERN. After receiving a PhD, she worked on precision investigations of unstable nuclei masses in ISOLDE-CERN in the framework of a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship. Afterward, Magdalena Kowalska became a physics coordinator of the ISOLDE facility while continuing her research in the fields of atomic and nuclear physics. Since the end of 2015, she is the Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary ERC Starting Grant in ISOLDE devoted to a first application of the ultra sensitive beta-detected NMR technique in chemistry and biology. In October 2018, Magdalena Kowalska became a physics professor at the University of Geneva.
Kenta Itahashi (RIKEN, Japan)
Kenta Itahashi is a hadron physicist who has been involved in study of bound systems of a meson and a nucleus. His career starts in the discovery of "deeply bound pionic atoms", where a pion is bound to a relatively heavy nucleus by utilizing a recoil-free missing-mass technique. He obtained his phD from the University of Tokyo in 1998 for the discovery and was awarded for new comers' award of nuclear physics forum in Japan and GENCO award in Germany. He has been leading a high precision spectroscopy of pionic atoms, which is contributing to experimental study of chiral symmetry and structure of the vacuum. Recent his interests extend to nuclear bound states of all pseudo-scalar mesons in the lowest mass nonet, pi, K, eta and eta'. They are all pioneering works. Especially, an exploratory experiment of eta'-nucleus bound states is challenging. He has been conducting a strategic staging approach to pursue the "eta'-mesic nuclei" starting with a conservative experiment and moving to more aggressive one. Recent remarkable progress was that a large detector apparatus WASA-at-COSY will be moved to GSI and the preparation for the exploratory experiment will be advanced rapidly. New experiments are to be conducted soon.
Katia Parodi (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany)
Katia Parodi received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Dresden, Germany, in 2004. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. In 2006 she returned to Germany as a tenured scientist and group leader at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center, obtaining in 2009 her Habilitation from the Heidelberg University. Since 2012 she is a full professor and Chair of Medical Physics at the Physics Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) where she initiated a dedicated curriculum for Medical Physics within the Physics MSc.
Her main research interests are in precision image-guided radiotherapy with special focus on ion beams, from advanced computational modeling to experimental development and evaluation of novel methods for ion imaging and in-vivo ion range monitoring in clinical and pre-clinical research. For her work she received several national and international recognitions, including the Behnken Berger Award in 2006, the IEEE Bruce Hasegawa Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award in 2009, the AAPM John S. Laughlin Young Scientist in 2015 and a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council in 2016. She is currently serving as a member of the editorial boards of Physics in Medicine and Biology, Medical Physics and Radiation Oncology. Since 2015 she is on the Board of the German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP), where she served as president in 2017-2018.
