Daniel K. Sodickson

Recently, Sodickson has explored new uses of emerging AI techniques in medical imaging. He helped to initiate the fastMRI collaboration between NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, announced in August of 2018, which aims to accelerate MRI using machine learning methods, and which has also resulted in a large open-source repository of raw MRI data.

A member, Fellow, and former Trustee of the ISMRM, Sodickson served as its President in 2017-2018. He also chaired the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Biomedical Imaging Technology (BMIT-A) from 2016-2018.

Sodickson then joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School, ultimately serving as Director of Magnetic Resonance Research in the Department of Radiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, before he joined NYU School of Medicine in 2006 as Director of the Department of Radiology's Center for Biomedical Imaging. In 2009, he became Vice-Chair for Research in Radiology at NYU.

Following Sodickson's 1997 paper introducing a rapid imaging technique called SiMultaneous Acquisition of Spatial Harmonics (SMASH), research and development in parallel MRI burgeoned, along with related research in image reconstruction and detector design. Parallel imaging hardware and software is now an integral part of modern MRI machines, and is used routinely in MRI scans worldwide. For his work in parallel MRI, Sodickson was awarded the Gold Medal of the ISMRM in 2006.

Sodickson grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a physicist and a social worker. He attended the Roxbury Latin School from 1978-1984, matriculating at Yale College in 1984. Dr. Sodickson graduated from Yale in 1988 with a BS in Physics and a BA in Humanities. He earned his PhD in Medical Physics from MIT in 2004 and his MD from Harvard Medical School in 2006, both as a part of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.