PET/CT with Dr. David Townsend

In today’s episode of VersantCast, we sit down with Dr. David Townsend, co-inventor of the PET/CT scanner. The PET/CT scanner, developed by Dr Townsend and Dr Ronald Nutt, was named by TIME Magazine as the medical invention of the year in 2000.

David W. Townsend obtained his B.S in Physics and his Ph.D. in Particle Physics and was a staff member for eight years at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He has received Honorary Doctorates from the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France and the University of Bristol in the UK. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Radiologists in London. Dr Townsend has co-authored over 175 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, is a reviewer for a number of scientific journals and has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. More recently, he received the prestigious Paul C. Aebersold Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, and the Edward J Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award from the IEEE NSS-MIC and shared the Rotblat Medal for co-authoring the 2016 most-cited paper in Physics in Medicine and Biology.