Lars Furenlid, PhD

Dr. Furenlid is a physical chemist/physicist with 30 years of experience in molecular imaging and the development and application of advanced instrumentation for x-ray and gamma-ray imaging and spectroscopy, optical imaging and spectroscopy, and related methods for biomedical research. He is a founding member and contact principal investigator and director of the NIH-P41-funded Center for Gamma-ray Imaging (CGRI), and served as project leader for the center since its inception in 1999.    

He has served as principal investigator, project leader, or co-investigator on federally and industry-funded research projects including grants from the NCRR, NCI and NIBIB institutes, and mentors graduate students working toward master’s and PhD degrees by conducting fundamental research and developing theory and hardware technologies as part of their thesis/dissertation projects. He has a broad physics, chemistry and structural biology background, and teaches graduate courses in the College of Optical Sciences on the physics and mathematics of imaging and spectroscopy. He also co-teaches a graduate course in the Biomedical Engineering/Cancer Biology programs on radiochemistry and molecular imaging methods in drug discovery. He currently serves as co-chair of the NIH SBMIT(10) study section, which handles SBIR and STTR proposals in the biomedical imaging field.

He has special expertise in the techniques required to develop and apply advanced x-ray and gamma-ray detectors, and commissioned SPECT, PET and CT imaging systems. This includes the physics of scintillation and solid-state detectors, methods of optics, pulse-processing electronics, digital data acquisition and data inversion/assessment/reconstruction with a variety of computational methods.