SNMMI names Townsend as Aebersold Award recipient

The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) has named David W. Townsend, PhD, as this year's recipient of the Paul C. Aebersold Award.

David W. Townsend, PhD, winner of the Aebersold Award. Townsend began his work on PET instrumentation development in the early 1980s, designing and building the first rotating partial-ring PET scanner using bismuth germanate block detectors. His contributions to 3D PET were influential in improving the signal-to-noise ratio of reconstructed PET images without increasing the amount of detector material, according to SNMMI.

In 1999, Townsend and colleagues introduced the combined PET/CT scanner, which was rapidly adopted and utilized in the nuclear medicine and molecular imaging field.

Townsend currently serves as a professor in the department of diagnostic imaging at the National University Hospital of Singapore and is director of the Clinical Imaging Research Centre in Singapore

The Aebersold Award is named for Paul C. Aebersold, a pioneer in the biologic and medical application of radioactive materials and the first director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Isotope Development.