Two School of Medicine professors were part of the organizing committee.
Photo: Drs. Piotr Walczak (left) and Miroslaw Janowski, wearing scarves/shaws given to them in the Felicitation Ceremony at the SIGN Conference.
Miroslaw Janowski, MD, PhD, and Piotr Walczak, MD, PhD, both professors in the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine and two of the co-founders of the Society for Image Guided Neurointerventions (SIGN), were part of the organizing committee of the Fourth SIGN Conference that took place from Jan. 5-7, 2024, at Ramoji Film City and KIMS Hospital in Hyderabad, India. Rao Gullapalli, PhD, MBA, worked on the organizing committee as well, until his death last April, and was instrumental in selecting his hometown of Hyderabad for the conference venue.
The Gullapalli Young Investigator Awards were established this year in his honor and recognized 10 investigators; eight received a $1,000 award, and two received a $500 award. Five of the Gullapalli Young Investigators are affiliated with the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine: research fellows Lukasz Kalkowski, PhD, and Jinghui Wang, PhD; PhD student Shriya Madan; and UMBC undergraduate students Mikolaj Walczak and Colleen Russel. The Gullapalli Young Investigator Awards were made possible by a generous donation from Abass Alavi, MD, professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and sponsor of the Alavi-Bradley Symposium that is hosted by the department, along with support from the Gullapalli family.
Department members were omnipresent at the SIGN conference, with professor Dheeraj Gandhi, MD, delivering a keynote lecture on “MR Guided FUS: Next Frontier in Image Guided (Non Surgical) Neurosurgery.” Among the invited speakers, professor Linda Chang, MD, MS, presented “Focused Ultrasound to Enhance Drug Delivery in Humanized NOG-IL34 Mice for Eradication of HIV”; Janowski presented “Multi-Scale Image Guidance for Brain Cancer Treatment”; and assistant professor Yajie (Kevin) Liang, MB, PhD, presented “NanoSynFAST as a Chemigenetic Indicator of Alpha-Synuclein Aggregation Dynamics in Live Cells.” Research fellows Guanda Qiao, MD, PhD, presented “Novel Combination of Osmotic Blood Brain Barrier Openers”; Abdallah Salemdawood, MD, presented “CRISPR-Based Base Editing of Tuberous Sclerosis Complex 2 Gene in Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells”; and David Gulisashvili, MD, presented “Image-Guided CD47 Blockade in Conjunction with the Focused Ultrasound-Based Blood-Brain Barrier Opening to Treat Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma in a Mouse Model.” Another UMSOM faculty member, Jung Soo Suk, PhD, from the Department of Neurosurgery, presented “Focused Ultrasound- and Polymeric Nanoparticle-Mediated Nucleic Acid Delivery to the Brain.”
Other notable speakers included Michael Lim, MD, professor and chair of neurosurgery at Stanford University; Tim Magnus, Md, PhD, chair of neurology at the University of Hamburg; professor Dirk De Ridder, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and a pioneer of neuromodulation from the University of Otago in New Zealand; and Jeff Bulte, PhD, MD, director of cellular imaging and professor of radiology and radiological science at Johns Hopkins University. Overall, 75 speakers presented their research.
The SIGN Conference attracted over 125 participants from all over the world and was well-covered by multilingual Indian media. The Fifth SIGN Conference (SIGN 2025) will be held Jan. 9-11, 2025, in Basel, Switzerland.