'Frontiers in High Field Brain MRI'

Bruce Hasegawa Memorial Lecture

Lawrence L. Wald, PhD
Associate Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School
Affiliated Faculty, HST at MIT
Associate Biophysicist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
Director, MGH NMR Core at Martinos Center
Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

Lawrence L. Wald, Ph.D.,  received undergraduate training in Physics at Rice University, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 under the direction of Prof. E.L. Hahn with a thesis related to optical detection of NMR.  He obtained further (postdoctoral) training in Physics at Berkeley and then in Radiology and MRI at the University of California at San Francisco where he worked on MR spectroscopic imaging of brain tumors and the development of phased array coils for high resolution imaging and spectroscopy with Drs. Vigneron and Nelson.  He began his academic career as an Instructor at the Harvard Medical School in the Brain Imaging Center of McLean Hospital and since 1998 at the Massachusetts General Hospital Dept. of Radiology in the NMR Center (now the A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging).  He is currently an Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Affiliated Faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division Health Sciences Technology. He is a visiting Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

He is the Director of the MGH’s Core imaging facility at the MGH Martinos Center which puts him in close contact with a diverse set of clinical and basic scientists. His research interests focus on MR methodology for high field brain imaging. He is an author on approximately 110 publications. Recent work has explored the benefits and challenges of highly parallel detection and its application to highly accelerated image encoding and parallel excitation. Additionally he is working on ultra-high field MRI (7 Tesla) methodology for brain imaging and improved method for studying the Human Connectome. Dr. Wald enjoys an active role in educational programs at MGH and MIT and through the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), the Organization of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and Radiological Society of North America (RSNA.)  He was recently elected as a Fellow of the ISMRM and to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biologial Engineering (AIMBE).

 This annual lecture honors the legacy of Dr. Bruce Hasegawa: his pioneering research accomplishments, his ability to educate and inspire those he taught and mentored, and his generosity towards others.