Eric Ahrens PhD

Dr. Ahrens’ research involves imaging innovations and adapting MRI to visualize molecular and cellular events in vivo. Currently, Ahrens is a Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of California San Diego, Director of Stem Cell Molecular Imaging at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, and Director of the Molecular Imaging Center at Stanford. Formally, he was a Professor of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He has also served as a senior research fellow in the Department of Biology, California Institute of Technology.

He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Los Angeles and was a graduate fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ahrens is engaged in the design, characterization and application of novel contrast agents for clinical cell tracking and visualizing gene expression using MRI. He has pioneered the use of fluorine-19 probes for clinical cell tracking and has published widely on spin physics, imaging probe development, in vivo imaging in animal models using high-field MRI, and the conduct of clinical trials. He is an inventor on 9 patents related to MRI. In 2005, Dr. Ahrens founded the biotechnology company Celsense, Inc. to translate imaging probe inventions born from his laboratory and to disseminate imaging probes to the biomedical community.