Lars R. Furenlid, PhD

I am a tenured Professor with appointments in the Department of Medical Imaging and the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, a joint appointment in Biomedical Engineering, and am also a member of the Arizona Cancer.  I am 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.  I am 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.    

I have 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 mentor graduate students working towards Masters and PhD degrees.  I have a broad physics, chemistry, and structural biology background, and teach graduate courses in the University of Arizona’s College of Optical Sciences on the physics and mathematics of imaging and spectroscopy.  I also co-teach a graduate course in the Biomedical Engineering/Cancer Biology programs on radiochemistry and molecular imaging methods in drug discovery.  I currently serve as co-chair of the NIH SBMIT(10) study section, which handles SBIR and STTR proposals in the biomedical imaging field.

I have 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.   I work closely with and advise Masters and PhD students who carry out fundamental research and develop theory and hardware technologies as part of their thesis/dissertation projects.

See the YouTube feature about Dr. Furenlid's Innovation Day Honor.