Position Title
Vice-Chair for Research, Department of Radiology
Dr. Badawi obtained his PhD in PET Physics at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, he joined the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in 2000, where he helped to set up their first clinical PET service. In 2004 he joined UC Davis. With Professor Simon Cherry, he co-led the EXPLORER Consortium, which designed and built the world’s first total-body PET scanner. More recently, he has been working with an NIH-funded consortium led by scientists at Yale to develop NeuroEXPLORER, an ultra-high performance brain PET scanner. He co-directs the EXPLORER Molecular Imaging Center with his medical colleague Dr. Lorenzo Nardo.
No organ acts completely independently of the rest of the body. Total-body PET has the potential to interrogate interactions between all the organs of the body (including the brain), using tracer compounds that can be detected at picomolar concentrations. There is great potential to use this tool to better understand how psychedelics and neurotherapeutics can act and be optimized.