Woodard named an AAAS fellow
Honored for contributions to the field of cardiovascular research
Woodard
Pamela K. Woodard, MD, the Hugh Monroe Wilson Professor of Radiology at the School of Medicine’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR), is among eight faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis selected as new fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.
Woodard is being honored for distinguished contributions to the field of cardiovascular research, particularly for translating new preclinical imaging platforms to patients.
She holds several patents for atherosclerosis imaging agents. She and her team have developed a PET radiotracer that detects a protein associated with plaques that may be unstable and prone to causing sudden major problems such as a heart attack or stroke. Woodard also is involved in evaluating novel PET agents to assess blood flow through heart muscle. Poor blood flow is a sign of cardiovascular disease that could cause serious problems such as heart attacks.
In 1995, as a resident at Duke University, Woodard published one of the first papers showing that blood clots in the lungs could be detected by spiral CT scan. As an assistant professor at Washington University, she was a principal investigator on a clinical trial funded by the NIH that resulted in a landmark paper in The New England Journal of Medicine and established multidetector CT as the standard of care for diagnosing blood clots in the lungs.
Also a professor of biomedical engineering, Woodard serves as MIR’s senior vice chair and as division director of Radiology Research Facilities. She also serves as director of the Center for Clinical Imaging Research, head of Advanced Cardiac Imaging CT/MRI, and director of the department’s NIH-funded T32 program for clinician-scientists.
Woodard earned her bachelor’s and medical degrees at Duke. She completed her internship in internal medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her residency in radiology at Duke before coming to Washington University for a clinical fellowship in cardiothoracic radiology. She joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1997.
See here to read about this years complete class of AAAS fellows this year.
