June 2025 – Ekaterina Shanina Received the 2024 Early Career Researcher Award from Physics in Medicine & Biology
We’re proud to celebrate another superstar trainee: PhD student Ekaterina Shanina was recently awarded the 2024 Early Career Researcher Award from Physics in Medicine & Biology for her outstanding paper, “PICASSO: a universal brain phantom for positron emission tomography based on the activity painting technique”. Her paper was selected as the top contribution to the journal’s 2024 Focus Collection, recognizing innovative work in imaging science.
Her award-winning research introduced PICASSO—a leading-edge, dynamic brain phantom for PET imaging that sets a new standard for evaluating scanner performance. Unlike traditional phantoms, PICASSO eliminates cold walls and air bubbles that distort measurements and introduces a novel “activity painting” method to simulate complex, realistic distributions of radiotracer uptake. This allows researchers to better test and calibrate high-resolution PET systems using brain-like activity patterns that mimic real physiology.
Developed under the mentorship of Professors Simon Cherry and Jinyi Qi, PICASSO is already proving invaluable in evaluating systems like the NeuroEXPLORER, and it has wide-reaching potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of neuroimaging studies.
Congratulations, Katya!
Related Links:
- 🔗 See her news coverage on Physics World: https://physicsworld.com/a/phd-student-ekaterina-shanina-wins-early-career-researcher-award-for-pet-phantom-study/
- 🔎 You can read Katya’s paper at: https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/ad84b5
- 👩🔬 Also, check out her work under “Poster Presentations” from the 2024 UC Davis Radiology Research Symposium. Katya gave a great e-presentation of her work: https://health.ucdavis.edu/radiology/research/symposium.html