Ciprian Catana MD, PhD is an Associate Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Integrated PET/MR imaging at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Dr. Catana received his MD degree from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy Targu-Mures Romania and, subsequently, conducted his PhD research in Biomedical Engineering focusing on PET/MRI instrumentation in Dr. Simon Cherry’s laboratory at the University of California, Davis and postdoctoral training at MGH. The focus of Dr. Catana’s career has been on advancing simultaneous PET/MRI toward meaningful clinical human use. Specifically, his efforts have concentrated on developing and validating this novel technology, on identifying and implementing methods to best exploit the combined data and, working closely with dozens of basic science researchers and physician-scientists, on applying these tools to studies in various patient populations. Dr. Catana was the Principal Investigator of two projects aimed at using multimodal imaging for studies in brain tumor and Alzheimer’s disease patients and is currently leading a project aimed at developing a 7T MR-compatible next generation dedicated brain scanner. Recently, Dr. Catana’s group also started to explore the benefits of using this novel technology for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases as well as whole-body oncological applications. As one example, Dr. Catana is currently the Principal Investigator of an academic-industrial partnership funded by NIH-NCI aimed at developing and translating machine learning approaches to improve the characterization of primary prostate cancer.