Dr. William Ball, MD

Professor and Head of Biomedical Engineering

Professor of Radiology and Pediatrics in the College of Medicine, Dr. Ball currently serves Head, Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC. He was instrumental in helping develop a second imaging center for research in adults at UC in 2000. He is Senior Researcher in charge of the Research Division of the Department of Radiology at CHMC. He currently holds funding from including the NIH for research in pediatric neuroimaging. His major area of research is in the application of advanced imaging methods to evaluate physiologic function in the developing brain. He is responsible for the initial startup and development of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC including establishing graduate and undergraduate educational programs, initiating programmatic research foci in Bioinformatics, Tissue Engineering and Medical Imaging and developing a university wide support infrastructure of biomedical engineering with local and regional industry. He will serve as a consultant to the curriculum for both graduate and undergraduate level training.

Dr. Alan Brody, MD

Associate Director of Radiology Research, Professor of Radiology and Pediatrics

After receiving his degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Alan S. Brody, MD, did his internship at San Francisco General Hospital. He then completed Pediatric and Radiology Residencies at the University of California in San Francisco. Dr. Brody is board-certified in both Pediatrics and Radiology. Dr. Brody completed his Pediatric Radiology Fellowship at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in 1987. From 1987-1993, he worked at the Children's Hospital of Buffalo, where he was director of CT services. In 1993, Dr. Brody assumed the position of Chief of Pediatric Radiology at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, AZ. In 1995, Dr. Brody joined the Department of Radiology at Cincinnati Children's.

Associate Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics & Neuroscience

Kim M. Cecil, PhD, received her BS degree from Kentucky Wesleyan College and her MS and PhD degrees from Vanderbilt University. After a post-doctoral fellowship in MR spectroscopy and imaging at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Cecil joined the Radiology Department and the Imaging Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in 1998. She serves as a researcher and clinical MR spectroscopist. In 2000, Kim M. Cecil, PhD, Antonius deGrauw, MD, PhD and Gajja Salomons, PhD, discovered creatine transporter deficiency syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by mutations in the creatine transporter gene (SLC6A8). Male patients demonstrate a significant reduction or absence of creatine in the brain, as indicated by MR spectroscopy. This is an X-linked mental retardation disorder thought to be second only to fragile X in prevalence.

Dr. Mark DiFrancesco, PhD

Assistant Professor of Radiology

Dr. DiFrancesco is a physicist with degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University (BS) and the University of Pittsburgh (MS, PhD). After 15 years of experience in the commercial sector developing medical devices, he joined the IRC in the fall of 2004 to take advantage of an opportunity to train for research in advanced MR imaging and analysis. Recent research activity has included the use of concurrent EEG and fMRI to detect functional correlates of spontaneous brain activity, the study of the neurocognitive effects of Lupus using fMRI, applyiing functional imaging to investigate attentional deficits arising from sleep restriction in adolescents, and assessing the impact of field strength on the quality of small animal brain imaging.

Dr. Scott K. Holland, PhD

Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, and Physics

Scott Holland is a physicist by training with a B.S. degree (1980) in Physics from Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA. and M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University. After a year (1985-86) as a Research Engineer with the Electromagnetic Sciences Laboratory at Stanford Research Institute (SRI International), Menlo Park, CA, Scott returned to the Yale School of Medicine as a post-doctoral fellow (1986-88) and later as an Assistant Professor (1988-94) of Diagnostic Radiology. He joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1994 as Associate Professor of Radiology and Pediatrics and served as Scientific Director of the Imaging Research Center at Children’s Hospital Medical Center until 2003. His research currently focuses on pediatric neuroimaging applications of MRI at high field; including perfusion MRI, functional MRI, microimaging of transgenic mice, and image processing methods.

Dr. Diana M. Lindquist, PhD

Assistant Professor of Radiology

Diana M. Lindquist received BS degrees in Chemistry and Math from the University of New Mexico (1989), her MA in Physical Chemistry from Brandeis University (1991), and her PhD in Applied Science from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (1998), where she became a magnetic resonance physicist/spectroscopist. She was on the faculty at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences before being recruited to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in 2006. She serves as the director for the In Vivo Microimaging Laboratory within the Imaging Research Center. Her research focuses on the metabolic effects of various pharmaceutical agents as measured by proton, phosphorus, and carbon magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Dr. Vincent J. Schmithorst, PhD

Assistant Professor of Radiology

Dr. Schmithorst is a physicist by training with BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the University of Cincinnati. Schmithorst's thesis was on utilizing an ionizing radiation detector in digital projection radiography to separate bone from soft-tissue components using information from the penetration depth of the x-ray beam. Dr. Schmithorst joined the Imaging Research Center in the Fall of 1997. His current research interests include the investigation of central auditory processing deficits in children with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the development of language function in children using fMRI, and white matter maturation in children's brains using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Additionally, Dr. Schmithorst is interested in the further development of data-driven techniques such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA)for fMRI data analysis; as well as techniques such as structural equation modeling (SEM) or multivariate autoregressive modeling (MAR) for analysis of effective and functional connectivity.

Assistant Professor of Radiology

Dr. Janaka Wansapura gained his BSc. (Hons.) degree in Physics from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He obtained his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from University of Cincinnati, OH. His dissertation was on the effect of diffusion in biological systems in MR imaging. Dr. Wansapura gained further training in MR imaging at Stanford University as a pot-doctoral fellow. At Stanford, he developed an MR based thermometry method using ultra-short echo imaging techniques. He returned to the Imaging Research Center in 2004 as a research assistant professor. Dr. Wansapura’s current research is focused on cardiovascular MR imaging both in human and in transgenic animal models. He has developed number of MR methodologies and image processing software that are currently being used at the Imaging Research Center for cardiac imaging research.