Cai Group Wins Multiple Awards from SNMMI
Three former Cai Research Group (https://mi.wisc.edu/) members were selected for Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) “30 Early Career Professionals to Watch” in 2020: Dalong Ni, Sixiang Shi, and Reinier Hernandez. All three are independent faculty now. Dalong Ni just started as a Full Professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China in October 2020, Sixiang Shi will start as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in January 2021, and Reinier Hernandez started as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at UW-Madison in May 2020.
Zachary T. Rosenkrans (4th year PhD student in the Cai Group) received the SNMMI Bradley-Alavi Student Fellowship in 2020. In addition, both of his abstracts were selected to compete in the Center for Molecular Imaging Innovation and Translation (CMIIT) Young Investigator Award (YIA) symposium at the SNMMI Annual Meeting, where only the top 7 scored abstracts in the category were selected to compete. The 1st place YIA winner was Carolina A. Ferreira, who received PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Weibo Cai and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital.
In the 2019 SNMMI Annual Meeting, members from the Cai Research Group swept the CMIIT YIA symposium and garnered all top 3 places, which has never happened before by a single research group. The 1st place winner was Lei Kang, 2nd place winner was Emily B. Ehlerding, and 3rd place winner was Dalong Ni. In addition, Carolina A. Ferreira, then still a PhD student in the Cai Research Group, won 2nd place in the SNMMI’s Radiopharmaceutical Sciences Council (RPSC) Young Investigator Award Symposium.
In the 2019 SNMMI Annual Meeting, two abstracts submitted by the Cai Research Group were chosen for Press Release, and the first authors for the two abstracts were Dalong Ni and Zachary T. Rosenkrans, respectively. Of note, about 10 abstracts were selected from the ~2000 abstracts total were selected for Press Release each year.
Three Cai Group members received Travel Awards to the SNMMI Annual Meeting in 2019: Carolina A. Ferreira, Tuanwei Sun, and Emily B. Ehlerding. A total of 7 Travel Awards were given for the entire meeting, which had ~6000 attendees total.
Dawei Jiang, then a postdoc in the Cai Group, received the Michael J. Welch Postdoctoral Travel Grant, and only one is awarded at each SNMMI Annual Meeting. Dr. Jiang just started as a Full Professor in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in October 2020.
Three former Cai Group members were selected for SNMMI “30 Early Career Professionals to Watch” in 2019 as well: Dawei Jiang, Emily B. Ehlerding, and Feng Chen. Emily B. Ehlerding was a PhD student in the Cai Research Group and is currently the Scientific Affairs and Education Manager at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer. Feng Chen was a postdoc in the Cai Research Group, and is now Head of Formulation Development at Elucida Oncology, Inc., a clinical development stage company based on proprietary ultra-small C-Dot nanotechnology.
At the 2019 SNMMI Annual Meeting, Prof. Cai was elected Fellow of SNMMI. SNMMI Fellowship is one of the most prestigious formal recognition available to long-time SNMMI members and symbolizes distinguished service to SNMMI, as well as exceptional achievement in the field of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging. At the time of election, Prof. Cai was the youngest SNMMI Fellow.