Dimitrios Karampinos is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the TUM Faculty of Medicine and a faculty member of the Munich School of Bioengineering. He has been leading the BMRR Group in the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology in TUM, since September 2012. He received his Diploma with honors from the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the National Technical University of Athens in 2003. In 2008, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Between 2009 and 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Musculoskeletal Quantitative Imaging Research Group of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging in the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his Habilitation in Medical Physics at TUM in March 2016. Dimitris is a Junior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and recipient of a European Research Council Research (ERC) Starting Grant.

Christof Boehm joined the group as a physics master student from the Technical University of Munich in February 2018 to write his one year full-time master thesis in the group. The project was focused on water–fat imaging in body applications where he developed a generalized Bayesian regularization algorithm based on graph-cuts. After his masters degree Christof continued his work in the group and started his PhD in April 2019. For his doctoral project, he is looking into body applications of quantitative susceptibility mapping to investigate feasibility, reproducibility and reliability of this methodology.

Philipp Braun joined the group in May 2022 after obtaining a Master’s degree in the Applied and Engineering Physics program at TUM. His work focuses motion-robust multi-parametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging of human adipose tissue to improve the specificity of MRI biomarkers of white and brown adipose tissue.

Daniela Junker joined the group in summer 2015. She received her board-certificate as a radiologist in 2018 after doing her residency at the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at TUM’s Klinikum rechts der Isar. She obtained her medical degree at TUM in 2012 and earned her doctorate degree in August 2015. In summer 2016, she worked as a research fellow at the Department of Radiology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA, for three months. In 2020 she received a “Sachbeihilfe” Grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She finished her Habilitation in July 2021. Daniela has been a Junior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) since 2022. During her residency she started working on MR imaging of brown adipose tissue. Her current work is focusing on metabolic imaging with an emphasis on adipose tissue imaging. Having a clinical background, she prepares and coordinates clinical studies.

Jessie Han joined the group in June 2020. She is a medical student at the Technical University of Munich and as part of the doctoral program at the TUM Medical Graduate Center intends to obtain her medical thesis. Her current work in the BMRR group focuses on the application of quantitative MR Imaging for the metabolic phenotyping of patients with obesity and diabetes and analyzing the effects of lifestyle interventions for clinical studies.

Cora Held joined the group in Oktober 2018 in as a Dr. med. student. As a medical student she is part of the doctoral program at the TUM medical graduate center. The traditional medical thesis gives medical students the possibility to gain experiences as a part-time researcher while completing their medical studies. Cora’s main focus in the group lies on quantitative, non-invasive imaging of brown adipose tissue (BAT) - responsible for non-shivering thermogenesis. Further characterization of BAT is of great interest, due to its potential role in human metabolism.

Elizabeth Huaroc Moquillaza started her Ph.D. in June 2020. Her doctoral project focuses on Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting and aims to contribute to a more accurate cancer diagnosis. Elizabeth’s ultimate motivation is to help patients by researching in MRI methods, medical image processing and artificial intelligence, and thereby contributing to the improvement of treatments and the better understanding of diseases. She graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) in 2011. Her bachelor thesis and subsequent research project in cervical spine MRI motivated her application for the master’s program Biomedical Computing at TUM graduating in 2017. During her graduate studies, she researched cardiac MRI segmentation algorithms at our hospital, CT applications at Siemens Healthineers and developed her master thesis in CNN for image segmentation at the CAMP-Chair (Prof. Navab). Before joining the group, Elizabeth worked in the medical imaging industry as project engineer and territory healthcare manager of the DACH region

Sean McTavish joined the group in February 2018 after obtaining a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the Univerity of Glasgow, Scotland. His project within the BMRR group is on methodological body diffusion-weighted MRI, and involves the use of single-shot EPI to image the pancreas and liver, and 3D TSE to image the prostate.

Stella Marlene Näbauer joined the BMRR group in November 2021 as Dr. med. student and research assistant, aiming for obtaining her doctoral thesis at the TUM Medical Graduate Center. Her work focuses on MR imaging and spectroscopy of the liver in obese subjects undergoing a calorie restriction and lifestyle intervention (LION study in cooperation with TUM Department of Nutritional Medicine).

Lisa Patzelt joined the group in October 2018 as a medical student from TU München with the intention to obtain her medical thesis. She is part of the doctoral program at the TUM Medical Graduate Center. Her work in the BMRR group is focusing on quantitative imaging of adipose tissue in obese women undergoing a caloric restriction and lifestyle intervention. This study is carried out together with the Department of Nutritional Medicine.

Johannes Raspe joined the BMRR group of Prof. Karampinos in May 2021 as a master student in the Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics program of TUM. He investigated algorithms to reduce the motion-induced signal loss in liver applications of diffusion-weighted MRI and finished his master project in June 2022. In July 2022, he switched to a PhD candidate position and is since then focused on the investigation of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in humans. The goal is to develop methods of acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis to quantify BAT in the supraclavicular fossa and potentially develop a predictive biomarker for obesity-related diseases.

Selina Rupp joined the group in January 2021 as doctoral candidate. She is a medical student at the Technical University of Munich and her main focus is on non invasive pancreatic fat quantification in obese subjects undergoing calorie restriction. Therefore she is part of the LION study group in cooporation with the institute for nutritional medicine.

Stefan Ruschke joined the group in April 2013 after graduation in mechanical / medical engineering from the Technical University of Munich. His work is focusing on quantitative water–fat imaging and spectroscopy methods in bone and MSK applications. Recent projects include the development of precise and robust fat fraction quantification and the estimation of other related parameters such as T2 and T2’ using gradient echo imaging sequences.

Sarah Schlaeger joined the group in April 2016 being a medical student at TUM. She is enrolled in the doctoral program “Translational Medicine”, which is a structured graduation program for medical students of the TUM School of Medicine highly interested in research. The program includes one year of full-time research work followed by two more years of part-time research. In the BMRR group at the Department of Radiology, TUM, she works in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in patients with neuromuscular diseases in collaboration with the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology. Her aim is to improve currently used acquisition methods for muscle imaging by developing and comparing new sequences and to define quantitative MRI based biomarkers for fatty and edematous changes in affected muscles. Therefore, she is collecting data in patients with varied neuromuscular diseases and coordinating the course of a large-scale study.

Jonathan Stelter joined the group in November 2020. He is a Physics student at TUM with a focus in biomedical physics. In his bachelor thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, he worked on electromagnetic simulations of RF transceiver arrays for ultra-high field MRI. In his master thesis he focuses on water-fat separation and quantitative susceptibility mapping methods based on MR multi-echo imaging in the breast.

Jan Syvaeri joined the group in April 2017 being a medical student at TUM. He is part of the doctoral program ‘Translationale Medicine’ of the TUM, which is a special graduation program of the TUM Graduate School, for medical students who have a special interest in medical research. The program includes one year of full-time research work followed by two more years of part-time research. In the BMRR group of the Department of Radiology, TUM, he works in the field of Metabolic Imaging in patients of different diseases. His main project has the aim to develop an early detection of cancer cachexia. Therefore, he is collecting data in patients with gastrointestinal cancer in a longitudinal study.

Mingming Wu obtained her Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in March 2014 and received her Ph.D. in Physics in February 2020 at the TUM. She has collected experience in ZTE imaging and MR Thermometry before joining the group as a research associate in February 2018. Her work at BMRR focuses on the study of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in human adults. The differentiation from white adipose tissue and the quantitative characterisation of BAT using different MR contrast mechanisms are aimed at.

Christoph Zöllner joined the group in October 2017 after graduating from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München with a master’s degree in physics. His education focused on theoretical and medical physics, with a master thesis project on CT imaging in the context of proton radiotherapy. In the BMRR group of the Department of Radiology, TUM, he works on the development of techniques for water-fat imaging and MR spectroscopy of ectopic fat and adipose tissue depots.

Webpage : https://cganter.userweb.mwn.de

Kilian Weiss is a Clinical Scientist for Philips taking care of the Magnetic Resonance research collaboration with the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at TUM since 2020. He received a Diploma in Physics from the University of Wuerzburg in 2008. In 2013, he received a Ph.D. from the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at ETH Zurich. From 2013 to 2014, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 2014 he joined Philips as a Clinical Scientist for Magnetic Resonance in Germany.