SAR Award Winners: Nelly Tan M.D. and Jonathan Young M.D.
03/04/2016
As alumna of Union College in Schenectady, New York, Dr. Young completed his undergraduate degree in Biology and Economics. He then attended medical school here at UCLA and will begin his neuroradiology fellowship this coming July. Dr. Young chose this particular specialty of radiology because he enjoys learning about neuroanatomy and the diver array of disease processes within the brain and spine. Dr. Young will be receiving the 2016 Society of Abdominal Radiology Howard S. Stern Research Award. This $15,000 grant is designed to facilitate visionary research in medical imaging by making funds available for pilot projects on ideas that are intellectually challenging but not yet well enough developed to be suitable for funding by mainstream granting agencies.
Dr. Young began working with his mentor, Dr. Steven Raman, seven years ago. Together, they created a large database of renal tumors with known histopathology and pre-operative multiphasic MDCT. Dr. Young states he feels extremely grateful for the "opportunity to take the lead in all aspects of our projects, from designing experiments and analyzing data to writing grant proposals and manuscripts -- as well as the opportunity to learn from Dr. Raman for he has played a tremendous role in my development as a radiologist and an investigator". Within the next five years, Dr. Young hopes that there will be further development of imaging biomarkers to predict the expression of molecular targets in renal cell carcinoma and that there will be multi-center prospective trials to validate the predictive performance of these imaging biomarkers.
In his free time, Dr. Young enjoys playing basketball and golf. He also enjoys watching the Lakers, Rams and Angels as well as both UCLA's basketball and football games. Congratulations Dr. Young and to your co-authors for this amazing achievement!
Dr. Nelly Tan completed the UC Riverside/UCLA BS-MD program. She came into radiology serendipitously, she says. "In medical school, I enjoyed most of my clinical rotations including internal medicine. But, I also really liked GU and coupled with my interest in procedures, I chose urology. I spent a year at NIH and the experience encouraged me to pursue academics. After two years of general surgery/urology in the East Coast, I decided to change specialty to radiology and returned to UCLA to join the Prostate Imaging Research Group. I've been fortunate to work with and be mentored by some of leading experts in this field.
I'm especially thankful to Drs. Fabien Scalzo, Steve Raman, Dieter Enzmann, Department of Radiology prostate Rad-Path program, CVIB, MII, Office of Research, and collaborators in Departments of Urology and Pathology who have allowed me to part of this outstanding team with visionary mission to improve how prostate cancer is diagnosed. None of the work would have been possible without the tremendous support from the faculty and staff who I have the fortune to work with on a regular basis.
I love radiology because it brings together the best of medicine (great minds and personalities, interesting pathology, and advance technology) allowing us to deliver care more efficiently, effectively and minimally invasively." The award Dr. Tan will be receiving is the Morton A. Bosniak Research award, worth $15,000. This award is slated for projects relevant to genitourinary (GU) radiology. This proposal that was chosen is "analogous to developing a Facebook face recognition program for prostate cancer. We want the computer algorithm to synthesize prostate MRI data and localize the cancer using pathology as ground truth. Our preliminary data suggests its diagnostic performance is comparable to radiologists. We hope to use this technology as a decision support tool for the radiology community."
Within the next five years, Dr. Tan hopes to deliver an intelligent software to complement existing prostate MR commercial packages. During her spare time, Dr. Tan enjoys tennis, running, learning, teaching, blogging, dancing, and singing. Congratulations once again to you, Dr. Tan and your co-authors on this great achievement!
