Director of UBC’s PET Imaging Laboratory

Dr. Vesna Sossi

Dr. Vesna Sossi is a nuclear physicist specializing in the application of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans to the study of Parkinson’s Disease. Dr. Sossi is the Director of UBC’s PET Imaging Laboratory and is a professor in UBC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy; she has been leading the UBC Positron Emission Tomography (PET) brain imaging program since 2009.

Dr. Sossi’s expertise and research interests lie in using clinical and pre-clinical imaging to investigate neurodegeneration and other brain diseases through development of instrumentation, data quantification, image analysis, kinetic modeling, image reconstruction and novel imaging protocols. She is particularly interested to further develop and exploit hybrid PET/MR imaging to gain access to as yet poorly investigated aspects of brain function such as brain energetics and neurovascular coupling in the healthy brain and as affected by neurodegeneration and exercise, as well as other possible neuroprotective mechanisms.

Dr. Sossi received a Laurea degree in high energy Physics from the University of Trieste Italy and a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of British Columbia in 1991. She has done a post-doctoral fellowship in the UBC/TRIUMF PET group working on Medical Imaging after completing her graduate degree. She has over 190 peer reviewed journal publications, and actively trains many graduate and undergraduate students. Vesna sits on several national and international review committees and received several CFI, NSERC and Michael Smith Health Research BC awards during her career.