Berson-Yalow Award

Dongzhi Yang, PhD, received the Berson-Yalow Award. The award commemorates Rosalyn S. Yalow, PhD, and Solomon A. Berson, MD, who together developed the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique in the 1950s. SNMMI established the award in 1977, the year that Yalow received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. Judges for the award choose the investigator who submits the most original abstract presentation at SNMMI’s Annual Meeting and who has made significant contributions to basic or clinical RIA research, or any area of research using the indicator-dilution method.


Yang is a postdoctoral research fellow in molecular imaging at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. He received his PhD in analytical chemistry from Northeastern University in Shenyang, China, in 2008 and teaches at Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China. His projects involve PET imaging with novel agents and antibodies for targeted radiotherapy and cancer detection. His winning abstract is titled “ImmunoPET of urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) system: broad applicability in cancer imaging.”

Loevinger-Berman Award

Joseph A. O’Donoghue, PhD, received the Loevinger-Berman Award, which was established in 1999 by the Medical Internal Radiation Dose (MIRD) Committee in honor of Robert Loevinger, PhD, and Mones Berman, PhD, who formulated the MIRD schema for internal dose calculations. The award is given in recognition of excellence pertaining to the field of internal dosimetry as it relates to nuclear medicine through research and/or development, significant publication contributions or advancement of the understanding of internal dosimetry in relationship to risk and therapeutic efficacy.

O’Donoghue is an associate attending physicist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, N.Y. His research focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of systemic malignant disease with radiolabeled molecules and molecular imaging of tumors. His recent studies have focused on imaging the tumor microenvironment (especially oxygen deficiency, or hypoxia); imaging metastatic prostate, colorectal, and renal cell tumors with radiolabeled monoclonal antibodies; and using the alpha particle-emitting agent radium-223 dichloride to treat prostate cancer that has metastasized to bone.

Edward J. Hoffman Memorial Award

Irène Buvat, PhD, is this year’s recipient of the Edward J. Hoffman Memorial Award, which is presented annually by SNMMI’s Computer and Instrumentation Council. The award was established to honor the memory of Professor Edward J. Hoffman and recognizes scientists in the field of nuclear medicine for their service and devotion to research and development of nuclear medicine instrumentation and to educating and training the next generation of scientists.

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