Elias A. Zerhouni, MD, has spent much of his career providing clinical, scientific and administrative leadership to a wide range of agencies all over the world. Dr. Zerhouni was the 15th Director of the United States' National Institutes of Health. From May 2002 to October 2008, he oversaw the NIH's 27 Institutes and Centers with more than 18,000 employees and a 2008 fiscal year budget of $29.5 billion. He successfully led a series of reforms at the NIH that led to the passage of the NIH reform Act of 2006 by the U.S. Congress.
Prior to joining the NIH, Dr. Zerhouni served as Executive Vice Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and chair of the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, and Martin Donner Professor of Radiology, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Prior to that, he served as vice dean for research at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Zerhouni's imaging research led to major advances in Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT scanning) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). He is credited with developing novel quantitative imaging methods used for diagnosing cancer, cardiovascular and pulmonary disease. As one of the world's premier experts in computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), he has extended the role of CT and MRI from taking snapshots of gross anatomy to visualizing how the body works at the physiologic and molecular level. He pioneered magnetic tagging, a non-invasive method of using MRI to track the motions and accurately measure the function of a heart in three dimensions. He is also known for refining an imaging technique called quantitative computed tomographic (CT) densitometry that helps discriminate between non-cancerous and cancerous nodules in the lung and for developing and applying the method of High Resolution CT for the study of heart and lung structure and function and for diagnosing cancer. He is the author of 212 publications and holds eight patents.
Partly based on his research and inventions, Dr Zerhouni founded or co-founded 5 start up companies. He founded Computerized Imaging Reference Systems (CIRS) in 1982 where he served as founder and chairman for several years. He founded Advanced Medical Imaging in 1989 which was later sold to a major public company. He is a co-inventor and co-founder of Biopsys Corporation which became public before being acquired by a major public company in 1996. He co-founded American Radiology Services and served as chairman and CEO of it until 2002 and he is a co-inventor and co-founder of Surgivision, Inc. an MRI image guided surgery company.
Dr. Zerhouni has been appointed to the boards of the Lasker Foundation, Research America, the Mayo Clinic, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and to the chairmanship of the Maryland Economic Development Commission. Dr Zerhouni has also been appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor of Science-Translational Medicine a sister publication of Science Magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).