Scientific Director, Preclinical Imaging & Testing
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Virginia is a physicist with expertise in the design, development, deployment and evaluation of non-invasive, imaging-based digital technologies and methodologies for assessing the disease phenotype and its response to therapy. Her current interests lie in imaging-as-a-service workflow optimization, digitization and throughput, multi-modal data integration and quantification, advanced data analytics and visualization, refinement and translatability of non-clinical imaging approaches to the clinical context and establishing the centrality of biomedical imaging in capturing biological responses and heterogeneities at the molecular, biochemical, cellular and organ level.
Virginia completed her PhD in experimental physics in 2008 with a focus on nuclear medicine technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She continued her postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she focused on computational evaluation of radiation-based diagnostic technologies for clinical breast and full-body imaging, before she moved to Philips Research in 2012 where she was responsible for technology demonstration of digital photonics. Virginia returned to academia, in the Langer and Anderson Labs at MIT, where she developed a multimodal portfolio of imaging-based approaches for the evaluation of drug delivery devices. She was a Visiting Scientist at CERN in 2017 collaborating on nanoscale radiation sensors and since 2019 she leads one of KI’s shared service centers, the Preclinical Imaging and Testing Facility (Preclinical IT), that is responsible for an end-to-end in-vivo evaluation of therapeutics using imaging and computation as core technologies. Virginia also serves at MIT’s Open Data Committee created by MIT Libraries and the School of Science.