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Cai Research Group Receives Multiple Awards at 2016 SNMMI Meeting

The Molecular Imaging and Nanotechnology Laboratory (http://mi.wisc.edu/) had another successful year at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) Annual Meeting in San Diego (June 2016) and received multiple awards.

Two Cai Group members (Christopher G. England and Shreya Goel) each received a Travel Award to attend the meeting. There were only a total of 15 Travel Awards given this year (another awardee from UW-Madison was Hector Valdovinos, a graduate student in Medical Physics). In addition, Reinier Hernandez and Sixiang Shi also each received a UW-Madison Conference Presentation Funds Student Research Travel Grant to attend the meeting.

There are many Young Investigator Award (YIA) Symposiums at the SNMMI Annual Meeting, where the highest scored abstracts were chosen to compete in the symposium. Three of the Cai Group abstracts were chosen to compete in three different YIA Symposiums, and Christopher G. England received a 1st place in the Cardiovascular Council YIA Symposium.

At the meeting, the Chinese American Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (CASNMMI) also had a competition for Young Scientist Award, and a former Cai Group postdoc Haiming Luo (now a postdoc at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital) received the 2nd prize for his work performed in the Cai Laboratory.

In addition, Sixiang Shi and Haiming Luo both received the SNMMI Alavi-Mandell Award for their 2015 publications in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, official journal of SNMMI.

At the SNMMI Annual Meeting, there are several summary sessions and highlight lectures where leaders in the field summarize the best abstracts presented at the Annual Meeting. Many of the Cai Group abstracts were presented in the highlight lecture, which covers a diverse scope of research areas including oncology, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes.

Lastly, Prof. Cai also co-organized and co-moderated 4 Continuing Education sessions, all of which were well attended.