Vice Head of Radiology Research
Professor of Radiology
Regents Professor of Optical Sciences
Dr. Harrison H. Barrett is a Regents' Professor in the Department of Radiology within the College of Medicine (COM) and in the College of Optical Sciences.
He earned his PhD in Applied Physics in 1969 from Harvard University while employed by Raytheon Research Division in Waltham, Mass., as a Senior Research Scientist. He stayed with Raytheon as a Project Leader in the Medical Electronics department until 1974, when he accepted a joint appointment of Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Barrett was appointed Professor in both colleges in 1976 and Regents' Professor in 1990. He also currently holds an appointment of Professor within the Program of Applied Mathematics, the Program in Biomedical Engineering, and the University of Arizona Cancer Center.
Dr. Barrett is Director of the Center for Gamma Ray Imaging (CGRI), founded with a large Research Resource Grant from the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and continuously funded since 1999.
This Center engages in technology development in five projects relevant to the use of radiotracers in medicine, including:
• Gamma Ray detectors.
• Electronics and imaging systems.
• Image science and image quality.
• Adaptive and multi-modality imaging.
• Methods for molecular imaging.
Dr. Barrett also has a MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) grant from NIBIB. Funded since 1992, the objective of this grant is to develop specialized parallel computers and apply them to medical imaging.
Current work concentrates on the latest generation of graphics processing units (GPUs). His group has demonstrated huge increases in processing speed in various problems of image reconstruction and optimal parameter estimation.
In his capacity as the Director of CGRI, Dr. Barrett collaborates with roughly 40 groups around the world, often supplying them with advanced detectors, imaging systems, or algorithms tailored to their specific research needs.
Throughout his career, Dr. Barrett has directly supervised 54 PhD dissertations, 20 masters theses, and approximately 10 postdoctoral fellows.
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