The Foundation of the ASNR awards Patricia Ellen Grant, MD, with the 2021 Outstanding Contributions in Research Award.
Dr. Grant is a Professor of Pediatrics and Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She holds the Boston Children’s Hospital endowed chair in Neonatology, is the Director of the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC) and is a clinical Neuroradiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Grant obtained her BSc and MSc in Physics and her MD from the University of Toronto. She did her internship at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver followed by residency in Radiology at Vancouver General Hospital. She obtained her fellowship in Neuroradiology from the University of California in San Francisco, where she first developed her lifelong passion for research in pediatric neuororadiology under the mentorship of A. James Barkovich, MD. She then spent 10 years at Massachusetts General Hospital where she was Division Chief of Pediatric Radiology and, under the mentorship of Bruce Rosen MD PhD and Gilberto Gonzalez MD PhD, first became an NIH funded researcher
In 2009, Stella Kourembanas MD and Rick Robertson MD recruited Dr. Grant to Boston Children’s Hospital and provided her with the resources to start a new research center, the FNNDSC. The goal of FNNDSC is to develop technologies that enable optimization of cognitive, behavioral and neurological outcomes in pediatric patients with medical disorders, in particular fetuses and neonates. The FNNDSC has attracted top talent from around the world, and as Director Dr Grant has led or collaborated on key initiatives that include: building a novel pediatric sized MEG system that has been FDA approved and is now used for presurgical planning in young epilepsy patients; developing a sophisticated computational infrastructure that reduces the burden for clinicians and researchers to employ analytics and deep-learning techniques on large clinical datasets and to enable real time analytics on streaming clinical data, work that was featured in the Washington Post in 2018; pioneering the use of Frequency Domain Near Infrared Spectroscopy and Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (FDNIRS-DCS) to monitor neonatal brain health in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and operating room; and developing novel MRI techniques to assess fetal neurodevelopment and placental health, featured on Science Friday 2017. The FNNDSC currently has 14 faculty members and 7 postdoctoral students.
Dr. Grant has been a PI or co-PI on ten NIH grants and one NSF grant since 2002, raising more than $25 million. She has published over 230 original articles in highly respected journals including AJNR, Radiology, Neurology, Neuroimage, Pediatric Research, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, and PNAS. Her work is highly influential, with over 14K citations, h-index 64, i10-index 177 [google scholar]. She has been invited to lecture around the world and gave the Mansfield Lecture at ISMRM in 2020. She has been a longstanding member of the ASNR, ASPNR, RSNA, SPR and ISMRM, serving on multiple committees for these organizations including the Board of Trustees for ISMRM and is a Senior Fellow of the ISMRM. Currently she sits on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
