Leadership

James Brink, M.D., Interim Director

James Brink Chief of Radiology

James A. Brink is Radiologist-in-Chief at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Chair of Radiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Chief of Enterprise Radiology at the Mass General Brigham (MGB) Health System, and the Juan M. Taveras Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). He will be serving as interim director of the Gordon Center until a replacement for Dr. El Fakhri is found.

Dr. Brink earned a BS degree in Electrical Engineering at Purdue University and an MD at Indiana University before completing his residency and fellowship at MGH in 1990. He joined the faculty at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine where he rose to the rank of Associate Professor prior to joining the faculty at Yale University in 1997. He served as Chair of the Yale Department of Diagnostic Radiology from 2006 to 2013 prior to returning to MGH as Radiologist-in-Chief.  In 2021, his responsibilities expanded to include service as Chair of Radiology at BWH and Chief of Enterprise Radiology at MGB.

Dr. Brink is a fellow of the Society for Advanced Body Imaging, fellow of the American College of Radiology, past-president of the American Roentgen Ray Society, past-president of the American College of Radiology, and immediate past-president of the International Society for Strategic Studies in Radiology.  Dr. Brink has been awarded gold medals from the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological Society of North America, and the American College of Radiology.  He is an honorary member of the European Society of Radiology, the Japanese Radiological Society, the Chinese Society of Radiology, the Chinese Radiologists Association, the Italian Society of Medical Radiology, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, and the International Organization for Medical Physics.  In 2019, Dr. Brink was awarded ‘Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer’ from Purdue University, and in 2020, he was elected as ‘Distinguished Emeritus Member’ by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. Dr. Brink has broad experience in medical imaging, including the utilization and management of imaging resources, with specific interest and expertise in issues related to the monitoring and control of medical radiation exposure. 


Georges El Fakhri, Founding Director

Georges El Fakhri

Dr. El Fakhri has recently made a transition to the Director of the Yale PET Center.

Dr. El Fakhri was a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and the founding Director of the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging. He also directed the Massachusetts General Hospital PET Core, and was Co-Director of the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.

Dr. El Fakhri is an internationally recognized expert in quantitative SPECT, PET-CT, and PET-MR. He has pioneered novel approaches to compensate for many of the physical factors affecting quantitative SPECT, PET/CT and PET/MR and objectively assessing the achieved improvement in image quality, specifically in PET oncologic, neurologic and cardiac imaging as well as in the development of novel approaches to quantitative cardiac and brain modeling.

In SPECT/MR, his pioneering work has identified the relative role of different brain structures (e.g., entorhinal cortex, anterior cingulate) in the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease in large cohorts of patients followed over a decade with perfusion SPECT and structural MRI.

Dr. El Fakhri’s Lab pioneered some of the early dopamine displacement studies with PET and more recently mapping neurotransmission (e.g., dopamine, serotonin) in normal subjects and severe depression. He has also pioneered the use of in-room PET for monitoring proton therapy and assessing changes in O-15 washout through kinetic modeling.

In the heart, Dr. El Fakhri developed the early kinetic modeling, parametric imaging and quantitative framework for Rb-82 imaging and validated measured absolute myocardial blood. Recent work includes the development of novel approaches to mapping mitochondrial complex I and membrane potential non invasively in the heart as well as developing synergistic approaches in PET/MR for motion compensation, anatomical priors, PET/fMRI and PET/MRS.

Dr El Fakhri is an IEEE and SNMMI Fellow.

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