As an engineering undergraduate at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in his native Greece, Vasilis Ntziachristos was attracted to biomedical imaging as a way to use his skills to benefit others. See CV

For his undergraduate thesis, he developed hardware and software platforms to improve the performance of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). To get hands-on experience with imaging applications, Ntziachristos took a fellowship at the Panum Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “It soon became apparent to me that I wanted to live at this interface between engineering, medicine and biology,” he says.

One year later, he was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia working with leading imaging scientist Britton Chance. There, Ntziachristos combined MRI with the emerging power of optical imaging to determine the molecular structure and function of tissues. The result was a new imaging approach to determine the molecular characteristics of breast cancer.

As a research fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Ntziachristos continued to refine the optical technique to identify the molecular signatures of various tissues. Taking advantage of the concurrent explosion of genomic information, he developed techniques to decipher the molecular signatures of genes and proteins in vivo.

After seven years at Harvard, Ntziachristos is now moving on to a post in Germany. In November, he will take over as director of the Institute for Biological and Medical Imaging at the GSF-National Research Center for Environment and Health and will also become chair for the biological-imaging department at the Technical University of Munich. “Vasilis will help us visualize molecular events to better understand biology and pathology,” says Gunther Wess, president of the GSF.

Ntziachristos has two major goals for the institute. He wants to create significantly better biological tools, and to move those tools into the clinic so that doctors can make more informed treatment decisions. His first challenge is building the multidisciplinary environment necessary for this work — he needs everything from chemistry expertise to skills in working with animal models — under one roof. Wess says it was Ntziachristos's collaborative zeal, as well as his technical expertise, that made him the perfect fit for such ambitions at the GSF.