Primary Job Title Board Advisor Primary Organization RefleXion Medical
Gender Male
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David W. Townsend is the Director of Clinical Imaging Research Centre (CIRC) and Professor of Radiology at the National University of Singapore. In 1995, Dr. Townsend was Principal Investigator on the first proposal to design and build a combined PET/CT scanner. The PET/CT scanner, attributed to Dr. Townsend and Dr. Ron Nutt, then
President of CPS Innovations, was named by TIME Magazine as the medical invention of the year 2000.
In recognition of his work on PET/CT, Dr. Townsend received the 2004 Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Academy of Molecular Imaging, the 2008 Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award from the Austrian Society of Nuclear Medicine and shares, with Dr. Nutt, the 2010 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology. Dr. Townsend obtained his B.Sc in Physics from Bristol University and his Ph.D. in Particle Physics from the University of London and was a staff member for eight years at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1980, Dr. Townsend joined the faculty of Geneva University Hospital as a physicist in the Department of Nuclear Medicine. He has worked on PET instrumentation development since the early eighties, and designed and built the first rotating partial ring PET scanner using BGO block detectors.
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 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE and in 2009 received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Mediterranean, Marseille, France. From February 2003 to 2009, Dr. Townsend was Professor of Medicine and Radiology, and Director of the Molecular Imaging and Translational Research Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
