The election for the new student representative of the WMSG for 2010-2011 is ready to begin! All student members of the WMSG are eligible to vote, just register for an account on this website (wmsg.org), then go to the Poll. ISMRM members who are not yet members of the WMSG can contact Kristina King of the ISMRM to join (it’s free for student members of the ISMRM!).

The nominees are, in alphabetical order,

Ivan Kirov
New York University, USA

Ivan’s undergraduate degree is in Biology from the University of California at Irvine. An avid interest in translational neuroscience and imaging led him to a Ph.D. from New York University in the spectroscopy lab of Oded Gonen. Ivan has published papers on traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis and spectroscopic quantification and has presented at ISMRM and the 2008 WMSG meeting in Krakow. At the 2010 ISMRM he was a finalist in the WMSG student poster competition. Currently, as a postdoctoral fellow, Ivan is building on his graduate work and taking on new, more uncommon, spectroscopic projects such as characterizing pediatric tuberous sclerosis complex and assessing treatment outcome of antiviral therapy in the macaque brain.

Hagen H. Kitzler
Dept. of Neuroradiology, University Hospital, Technische Universitaet Dresden, Germany

Hagen completed his M.D. and gained his doctoral degree from the University of Technology, Dresden, Germany. As a neuroradiologist in training his scientific focus of interest is quantitative MR imaging of white matter diseases. He recently conducted a post-doctoral fellowship under the guidance of Dr. Brian K. Rutt at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada that allowed him to use multicomponent relaxometry to study Multiple Sclerosis. Returned to Germany, he is continuing translational research integrating MRI advances into clinical MS trials.

Rebecca Samson
UCL Institute of Neurology, UK

Rebecca completed a PhD under the supervision of Prof Paul Tofts at the UCL Institute of Neurology, focusing primarily on quantitative Magnetisation Transfer (qMT) imaging in the brain. She is currently working as a PostDoc at the UCL Institute of Neurology under Dr Claudia Wheeler-Kingshott and has continued to pursue research in the field of quantitative MRI, with a focus on multiple sclerosis. Her recent work has included the implementation of Diffusion Tensor Imaging of the optic nerves at 3.0T as well as quantitative relaxometry and qMT imaging, lesion probability mapping in MS, and most recently the investigation of parallel RF transmission in MTR mapping in the brain.

Emily Wood
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Emily is M.D./Ph.D. student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Daniel Reich, M.D., Ph.D in the Translational Neuroradiology Unit, Neuroimmunology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke, NIH. Emily is currently developing spectroscopy and diffusion tensor MRI methods to evaluate the relationship between white matter microstructure, cognitive performance and prognosis in Multiple Sclerosis and HIV-associated Dementia. She is a new member of the WMSG and is very excited to be involved in the community.