User:HRShami/Kamil Ugurbil

Kamil Ugurbil is a Turkish American neuroscientist, researcher and academic. He is the McKnight Presidential Professor in Radiology, Neurosciences, and Medicine and is the Director of the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) at the University of Minnesota. He is most known for introducing magnetic resonance imaging of neuronal activity in the human brain (fMRI) through his laboratory CMRR at University of Minnesota.

Ugurbil’s research focuses on magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and spectroscopy including ultrahigh field MR methodology and instrumentation. He has pioneered the use of these methods in a variety of biomedical applications, predominantly in the study of brain function. His research has resulted in significant accomplishments such as imaging brain function and connectivity with magnetic resonance techniques at fields of 7 Tesla and higher, elucidating the biological mechanisms underlying the functional mapping signals in fMRI, and development of MR imaging and spectroscopic techniques at ultrahigh magnetic fields to advance biomedical research in the human body. He has published over 200 scientific articles.

Ugurbil is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he received the Victor M. Haughton Award from the American Society of NeuroRadiology and in 2019, he was awarded the IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology.

Early life and education
Ugurbil was born in Tire in 1949. He went to a bilingual school in Izmir and then to a high school in Istanbul. He came to the United States in 1967, where He received an A.B. in Physics from Columbia College in 1971. After completing his bachelors degree, he worked for a year in the lab of Cyrus Levinthal, who wanted to use graphical computational tools to digitize electron micrographs and follow neurons as they developed and made connections.

Ugurbil received an M.A. in 1974, an M. Phil in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1977, in Chemical Physics, all from Columbia University. For his research in M.Phil, he was awarded the Hammett Award for Original and Distinguished Research. As a PhD student, he employed several different techniques, including NMR, to study electron transport and a speciﬁc copper-containing protein from bacteria involved in electron transport.

In 1977, he joined Bell Laboratories for his post doctoral training. There he worked with Bob Shulman on NMR spectroscopy studies of intracellular processes in living cells.

Career
In 1979, Ugurbil joined Columbia University as a Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry. In 1982, he left Columbia University to join University of Minnesota as an Associate Professor, becoming Full Professor in 1985. He founded the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) in 1991 and has since served as its director.

In 1996, Ugurbil was endowed the Margaret & H.O. Peterson Chair of Neuroradiology at the University of Minnesota. From 2003 to 2008, he served as the Director of Max Planck Institut für Biologische Kybernetik, Hochfeld Magnetresonanz Zentrum, Tübingen. In 2003, he was appointed as McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair Professor.

Ugurbil served on the Editorial Boards of Biochemical Journal from 1989 to 1994, of NMR in Biomedicine from 1987 to 2003 and of Journal of Neurophysiology from 2001 to 2006. He was the Associate Editor of Journal of Magnetic Resonance from 1996 to 1999 and served as the Advisory Editor of Neural Computation Journal in 2014.

Research
Ugurbil's research has been focused on the development and application of ultrahigh field magnetic resonance (MR) methods for neuroimaging, particularly for imaging of brain activity (functional imaging (fMRI)), and the use of these methodological and instrumentation developments with neuroscience applications in the human and animal brain to advance understanding of brain function in health and disease.

Discovery of fMRI
Ugurbil's lab, CMRR, was one of the two laboratories that independenty introduced fMRI in the early 1990s. Using manipulations of the physiologic state of the anesthetized animal, such as altering oxygen content of inhaled gas, Seiji Ogawa described in 1990 the effect of deoxyhemoglobin on MR images of the brain, and named it Blood Oxygenation Dependent (BOLD) contrast. The use of this contrast mechanism for functional mapping of human brain activity was achieved in Ugurbil’s laboratory in collaboration with Ogawa. This effort was also accompanied by the first modeling and experimental papers aimed at elucidating the mechanism underlying the functional imaging signals.

Development of high and ultrahigh magnetic fields for MRI and spectroscopy
One of the primary foci of Ugurbil's work has been the effort to exploit very high magnetic fields for human studies in order to enhance the biological information content, accuracy, and resolution of imaging and spectroscopy signals. His laboratory was one of the first three laboratories that initiated 4 Tesla (T) human imaging at approximately the same time in 1990s. His lab was also the first to introduce 7 Tesla for studies of human brain function in 1999. This effort in ultrahigh magnetic fields was complemented with fundamental studies on the physics of high field/high frequency imaging in the human body, development of high frequency RF methods and instrumentation (such as parallel transmit concepts and hardware), and introduction of new data acquisition methods, to attain some of the most advanced neuroimaging capabilities.

Understanding mechanisms underlying functional mapping signals in fMRI
Subsequent to the introduction of fMRI, Ugurbil’s group made seminal and pioneering contributions towards understanding the mechanisms underlying fMRI signals, the spatial scale of neurovascular coupling, and the nature of mapping signal with different functional contrast encoding approaches; this knowledge was then used to develop methods for functional mapping at the level of cortical columns and layers in the human brain.

The Human Connectome Project
The Human Connectome Project (HCP) was five-year project sponsored by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, split between two consortia of research institutions. The project was launched in July 2009. HCP aimed to map connections in the human brain in the mm scale in normal adults in their mid-life. This project was awarded to a consortium led by the Washington University and the University of Minnesota, Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) with David Van Essen from Washington University in St. Louis and Ugurbil serving as co-PIs. Ugurbi’s group was responsible for all the technical developments for image acquisition and reconstructions methods. Starting from developments already in progress in Ugurbil group, major advances for image acquisition were accomplished leading to the highest temporal and spatial resolution fMRI and diffusion weighted (dMRI) images of the human brain.

In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy
One of the first pioneering efforts towards using magnetic resonance to extract biochemical and physiologic information non-invasively in intact biological systems was started in Bell Laboratories Biophysics group where Ugurbil worked after his PhD. In this small group, Ugurbil and colleagues introduced and demonstrated the use of magnetic resonance spectroscopy in intact biological systems.

Many years later many of these techniques were used to study bioenergetics of neuronal function in the human brain at ultrahigh magnetic fields in Ugurbil’s laboratory in the University of Minnesota. Some publications that exemplify this effort are listed below.

Design of novel RF pulses, and MR acquisition sequences
Ugurbil has also done considerable working in the development of new methods for MR image or spectra acquisitions and radio-frequency (RF) pulse design, and improvements of such methods. Some of the most commonly used methods in the biomedical applications of MR were introduced by Ugurbil and his colleagues and include, for example, chemical shift imaging for spectroscopy; adiabatic “planerotation” RF pulses, their optimization, and their use in spatial-spectroscopic encoding; parallel transmit methods for RF pulse design for improved RF homogenity and power deposition constraint and high contrast anatomical imaging at high magnetic fields.

Awards and honors

 * 1976 - Recipient of Hammett Award for Original and Distinguished Research
 * 1980 - Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award
 * 1983 - NIH Research Career Development Award
 * 1993 - Werner-Gren Distinguished Lecturer, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
 * 1996 - Gold Medal from the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
 * 1997 - Inducted as Fellow, International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)
 * 1996 - Margaret & H.O. Peterson Chair Professorship, University of Minnesota
 * 2001 - Science Day Lecturer, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne
 * 2004 - Segerfalk Award Lecturer, University of Lund, Sweden
 * 2005 - Honorary Doctorate (Doctorate Honoris Causa), University of Utrecht, Netherlands
 * 2005 - Elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * 2007 - Elected into the National Academy of Medicine, USA
 * 2009 - Elected Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance (ISMAR). (2009 is the first year ISMAR established ISMAR Fellowship)
 * 2009 - Sir Peter Mansfield Lecture ESMRMB (European Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology)
 * 2010 - 5th Annual Glen D. Dobben Memorial Lecture, University of Illinois, Chicago
 * 2010 - Centennial Lecture, University of Florida, Gainesville
 * 2010 - Human Connectome Project Award from NIH, Co-Principle Investigator
 * 2011 - Honorary Doctorate (Doctorate Honoris Causa), University of Maastricht, Netherlands
 * 2013 - Elected into the Academy of Device Innovators, University of Minnesota
 * 2013 - Erwin Hahn Lecture, Erwin Hahn Institute, Essen, Germany
 * 2013 - Appointed to the fifteen-member BRAIN Initiative (USA) Working group
 * 2014 - Elected into National Academy of Inventors, USA
 * 2014 - Richard Ernst Lecture and Gold Medal (ETH, Zürich)
 * 2015 - Distinguished Fellow, SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind
 * 2016 - Vehbi Koç Award
 * 2018 - Haughton Award, ASFNR (American Society of Functional Neuroradiology)
 * 2019 - IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology

Books

 * fMRI: From Nuclear Spins to Brain Functions (2015)