Dr. Thad Wadas is an Associate Professor of Radiology and the Director of the Small Animal Imaging Core Facility at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine.  He is also a member of the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center.  He serves as an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, an Ad hoc grant reviewer for the NIH MEDI study section, Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In addition, He gave the plenary lecture at the 2018 Korean Society of Radiopharmaceuticals and Molecular Probes Conference in Seoul, South Korea. He has received funding from the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Melanoma Research Alliance and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

Dr. Darpan Pandya is an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Radiology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine and is supported by research funding that is administered by the National Institutes of Health, Melanoma Research Alliance and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. He has 13 years of experience in the fields of cancer imaging, targeted radiotherapy, complex ligand synthesis, metal ion coordination chemistry and radiometal-chelate chemistry. These research efforts in radiopharmaceutical development have resulted in 8 patents and more than 25 journal publications, which have been cited more than 470 times in peer reviewed journals. Recently, He co-developed [225Ac]Ac-DOTA-MC1RL, which is a targeted alpha particle therapy for ocular and cutaneous melanomas that will enter a first-in-human clinical trial in April 2020. Currently, He is developing novel radiopharmaceuticals for the imaging and therapy of cancer using 64Cu, 89Zr and 225Ac, respectively. In addition to his research endeavors, He serves as a manuscript reviewer for several prestigious journals including Bioconjugate Chemistry and the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.  He also serves as an abstract reviewer for the World Molecular Imaging Congress and the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.

Dr. Akesh Sinha is a Research Associate in the Department of Radiology at the Carver College of Medicine. For nearly two decades, he has been working in the field of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and his expertise lies in ligand discovery and antibody engineering for theranostic purposes. Moreover, he has developed a high-throughput discovery platform using single antigen specific B cells to isolate, purify and characterize monoclonal antibodies that target novel, cancer- specific, cell surface antigens. His research efforts have resulted in six peer-reviewed research articles that have been cited nearly 200 times in international journals. He is also a member of The Antibody Society.