Faculty and Staff
David W. Townsend Ph.D
University of Tennessee Medical Center
1924 Alcoa Highway, Box 93
Knoxville, TN 37920-6999
Phone: (865) 544-6188
Fax: (865) 544-8694
Email: dtownsend@utmck.edu
 Biography David
W. Townsend Ph.D., joined the University of Tennessee in Knoxville
in February 2003 as Professor of Medicine and Radiology, and Director
of the Cancer Imaging and Tracer Development Program. He obtained
his Ph.D. in Particle Physics from the University of London and
worked for eight years at the European Centre for Nuclear Research
in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1980, Dr Townsend moved to Geneva University
Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland as a physicist in the Department of
Nuclear Medicine.
Dr. Townsend
has worked on the development of instrumentation for Positron Emission
Tomography (PET) since the early eighties, and has been a senior
consultant for Siemens Medical Solutions, and formerly for CTI PET
Systems (CPS), Knoxville, Tennessee since 1992. He initially worked
on the development of 3D reconstruction and methodology for PET
in collaboration with Hammersmith Hospital, London, and later designed
and built the first rotating partial ring PET scanner using BGO
block detectors. The design was commercialized as the ECAT ART scanner
by CPS in 1994.
In 1993,
Dr Townsend moved to the University of Pittsburgh as an Associate
Professor of Radiology and Senior PET Physicist. He was Co-Director
of the Pittsburgh PET Facility from 1996-2002, and became Professor
of Radiology in 2000. In 1995, Dr Townsend was Principal Investigator
on the first proposal to design and build a combined PET/CT scanner,
and subsequently on the competing continuation grant that is active
until 2003 to further develop PET/CT methodology. The PET/CT scanner,
attributed to Dr Townsend and Dr Nutt, President
of CPS Innovations, was named by TIME Magazine as the medical invention
of the year 2000. From 1999-2001, Dr Townsend worked part of the
time at CPS in Knoxville on the development of the commercial BIOGRAPH
PET/CT scanner. Dr Townsend and Dr Nutt also hold a patent on the
PET/CT concept.
Dr Townsend has been further funded by the National Cancer Institute
to collaborate with Siemens Molecular Imaging and the Institute
of Medical Physics at the University of Erlangen in Germany to design
and build the next generation of high performance, combined PET/CT
scanners based on LSO detectors. The $3M NCI grant covers the period
2002-2006, representing over a decade of NCI funding for the PET/CT
program.
Dr. Townsend
was honored in 2004 as the Distinguished Clinical Scientist by The
Academy of Molecular Imaging for his contributions to the development
and enhancement of PET/molecular imaging.
His most
recent achievement is his election to IEEE Fellow, one of the Institute's
most prestigious honors, for contributions to Positron Emission
Tomography (PET).
David
W. Townsend cv
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