Diagnostic imaging

Interview with Stephen Williams, formerly Assistant Research Director of SLAC. Williams describes his connections with SLAC since his retirement in 2011, and he recounts his childhood in Michigan and his early fascination with electronics. He explains his reasons for attending the University of Michigan, where he majored in physics and where he determined he would go to UC Berkeley for graduate school to work with Victor Perez-Mendez on magneto-strictive readouts for wire spark chambers. Williams discusses his postdoctoral work at SLAC working with David Leith, and his subsequent research on head coils and software in nuclear medicine at UCSF. He describes the research mission of Group B at SLAC and the Cherenkov technique, and the opportunities that led him his management position as director of engineering and as an engineering manager for Diasonics. Williams describes the change in leadership from Burt Richter to Jonathan Dorfan, and the circumstances of becoming as Acting Research Director. He discusses the safety protocols that needed to be improved in consultation with the DOE, and at the end of the interview, Williams reflects on the ways SLAC has stayed true to Panofsky’s original vision.

Interview with Kyle Myers, Director of the Division of Imaging, Diagnostics, and Software Reliability in the FDA Center for Devices in Radiological Health. Myers recounts her childhood and the many moves her family made in support of her father's career in engineering management for General Electric, and she describes her father's formative influence and encouragement for her to pursue a career in science. She describes her college course work in physics at Occidental and Caltech, and she describes her decision to pursue a degree in optical sciences at the University of Arizona. She describes her work at the Jet Propulsion Lab and how this experience focused her interest on optics. Myers discusses working with her graduate advisor Harry Barrett on human perception and radiological imaging, and the importance of the research support she received from Kodak. She describes her postdoctoral work at Corning developing long-distance optical fibers, and she explains the circumstances leading to her career focus in medical imaging research at the FDA. Myers discusses the administrative evolution of the relevant offices and research centers at the FDA over the course of her career, and she discusses some of the major technological advances and her role in their development, including CT imaging, MRIs, and mammography screening. She describes some of the partnerships in the trade industry and across the federal interagency process that serve as important partners in her work, and she explains the adjudication process when a company is at odds with an FDA review of a given device. At the end of the interview Myers conveys her interest in the future prospects of digital pathology and the benefits it promises in disease detection and treatment.

Interview with Robert Jennings, retired since 2018 from the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, where he was a research physicist. He recounts his childhood in Southern California and the formative influence of Sputnik on his physics education. Jennings discusses his undergraduate experience at Occidental and his master’s work at UCLA, and he describes his postgraduate work at the NASA Ames Research Center where he worked on optical detectors. He explains his decision to pursue a PhD at Dartmouth where he studied under John Merrill and worked on Tonks-Dattner resonances. Jennings describes the circumstances leading to his postdoctoral research in Brazil at the Institute of Atomic Energy, where he worked on medical radiation in the Division of Solid-State Physics. He discusses his subsequent research with John Cameron at the University of Wisconsin’s Medical Physics section to develop spectroscopy systems. Jennings explains that the expertise he developed in radiation and modeling in Wisconsin served as his entrée to the FDA ,which excited him as the place where the most impactful research was happening at the time. He surveys the major projects he was involved with over his career, including human visual signal detection, quality assessment of medical devices, improving mammography diagnostics, tomosynthesis, and CT scanners. At the end of the interview, Jennings surveys the fundamental developments that have advanced over the course of his forty-plus year career at FDA, his major contributions in tissue simulation science, and why he believes AI will become increasingly central to advances in medical imaging.