Training
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How do we train our students, postdocs, and officers to be world-class imaging scientists and sustaing world-class imaging science in the UK?
Members
Nick Long, Paul French, Ramon Vilar Compte, Rebecca Wilson and Rebecca Nadal
Background & Rationale
As the world of biomedical imaging continues to move forward, the demand for scientists who understand imaging in all its complex ramifications and who can help design and produce the imaging technologies of the future will continue to increase. In particular, there will be a need for more scientists who can transcend the disciplinary boundaries and who can combine biological and medical insight and knowledge with the development and refinement of imaging technologies.
A basic understanding of cellular, molecular and systems biology will improve collaborations between imaging technologists (physicists, mathematicians and engineers) and life science users (biologists, clinicians and non-clinicians), and, most importantly, provide both with insight into the technology requirements for the foreseeable future. A new breed of imaging scientists, with greater insight into the biological and medical fields, would help ensure that future imaging technologies and methodologies are more effective at improving human life through scientific discovery and clinical application. Equally, by exposing biologists and medical students to biomedical imaging courses (encompassing probe design, underlying physics and signal processing aspects of the technologies) will help them to realise the true potential of these technologies and result in more effective usage.
New student training programmes for imaging research at multiple levels will be important for the continued growth in this field and to ensure that emerging technologies are used and applied to their full potential. Imaging training offered at both undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development levels, with short courses ranging from basic, advanced, to highly specialised, would be beneficial to the biomedical imaging community as a whole.
Implementing MSc/PhD training programmes, in particular, will not only help produce the multidisciplinary imaging scientists of tomorrow, but will also help build links between supervising academics from different disciplines, and potential industrial partners. If structured effectively, new student training programmes will help enhance current multidisciplinary collaborations and boost the application of imaging technologies. In one model, students would have at least two supervisors for their PhD project (e.g. a physicist and a biologist) and work in two or more different labs. Such student training programmes can enhance the relationship between technologists, biologists and medical researchers, leading to more effective grant proposal applications in the field of biomedical imaging. Co-supervised students can make a huge difference in helping to build a cohort between the different disciplines and will bridge the gap between the technologists and non-technologists.
In addition to producing more imaging scientists who have an understanding of biological and medical aspects, student training programmes are an effective way of building capacity in a given area. A training programme in biomedical imaging would stimulate increased use, and demand for, new and existing technologies. Bioimaging students could help to make imaging technologies more accessible to other disciplines and open up new avenues of investigation, with new requirements and challenges being put forward by users.
Industrial partners are keen to engage with training programmes of this kind that can provide them with access to new research and technologies and also to employable trained specialists. Training programmes can therefore help augment industrial involvement in the biomedical imaging community and enhance knowledge transfer between the two sectors. MRes courses, in particular, encourage industrial collaboration when industrial partners either provide teaching in the MRes course or when industrial employees attend such courses (full-time or part-time).
Recommendations:
The goal should be to develop training programmes to produce the next generation of imaging scientists to address current and future biomedical challenges. To do this we must bring together basic science, clinical and technology aspects in coherent programmes that can enhance technology development and application and increase their impact in biomedicine. Such training programmes should be aimed at bridging differences, perspectives and methodologies, so that young scientists can thrive in a multidisciplinary environment.
A 1+3 year MRes+PhD training programme has proved to be a very successful format, providing time for specialised training across the different intellectual cultures demanded by imaging-based science. Such a programme could begin with a one-year full-time Masters in Research (MRes) course, consisting of an eight-month interdisciplinary research project, plus taught lecture modules on elementary and advanced aspects of biomedicine, imaging techniques and applications, specialist lectures in transferable skills, a literature review on an imaging-related topic, group project work and workshops on the latest developments in imaging science. In the second year students progress to PhD research projects with multiple supervisors - which could entail supervisors from both engineering/physical sciences and from biological/medical sciences. This joint supervision will expose them to different scientific cultures and ensure that they experience technological development as well as application. With such a programme, the students can be trained as a cohort, so that students working on different imaging techniques can come together and benefit from dedicated seminar series (internal and external) and multidisciplinary journal clubs that can facilitate networking.
Current Training Programmes in BioImaging in the UK:
- Imperial College London offers a number of imaging related MRes and PhD courses.
- The most specific to bioimaging is the one year MRes in Bioimaging Sciences, which features taught courses covering a wide range of aspects of bioimaging (PET, MRI, optical imaging, ultrasound - techniques and applications) and an interdisciplinary research-project. This MRes aims to train imaging scientists for industrial and academic research with the ability to carry out research within multidisciplinary teams, and with knowledge of basic and advanced concepts in bioimaging sciences. The Course Directors are currently exploring ways of expanding this course into a 1 + 3 (MRes + PhD) training and research programme.
- The Chemical Biology Centre (CBC) at Imperial offers multidisciplinary MRes+PhD training (MRes in Chemical Biology of Health and Disease) that often embraces the development and application of imaging technology.
- For more intensive optics related imaging research training, the Physics Department offers an MRes+PhD programme in Photonics that covers optical imaging at all scales.
- UCL have a Doctoral Training Programme in Medical and Biomedical Imaging which is offering studentships starting September 2010. The studentships are funded by an MRC capacity building award, MRC CASE studentships, EPSRC CASE studentships and EPSRC Doctoral Training Grant.
- Kings College offer a one-year full-time MSc in Radiopharmaceutics and PET Radiochemistry – a particular aspect of molecular imaging.
- Imperial College, Kings College, Uppsala University & University of Strasbourg are planning to set up a pan-European Masters program in Radiochemistry and Probe Design to start October 2011, as part of a Euro-BioImaging initiative.
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