معرفی
Ansel Hillmer, PhD, is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University, serving as the Associate Director of Imaging for the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) program. His primary affiliation is with the Yale School of Medicine. He holds additional roles in the Bioimaging Sciences Center, Center for Brain & Mind Health, and directs the Hillmer Lab. Hillmer’s research focuses on developing novel PET radiotracers and imaging methodologies to study neurobiological mechanisms in psychiatric disorders such as PTSD and alcohol use disorder. He also explores dopamine and glutamate systems, synaptic density quantification, and cortisol regulation in the brain.
Education includes a BS in Physics from Valparaiso University (2009), followed by MS and PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2011–2014). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University (2016). His work integrates interdisciplinary approaches, combining engineering, AI, and clinical neuroscience to advance translational research. Key projects include characterizing immune-related targets in the brain, studying acute alcohol effects on neuroimmune systems, and assessing cannabis-induced dopamine release.
He has secured significant grant funding, including a 2022 National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) grant for developing a PET tool targeting colony stimulating factor receptor 1. His research emphasizes multimodal imaging data analysis (e.g., fMRI-PET fusion) and methodological innovations like Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for radiotracer interpretation. Hillmer collaborates extensively with colleagues such as Richard Carson, Kelly Cosgrove, and Irina Esterlis, contributing to peer-reviewed studies across neuroimaging and translational medicine.
