Moritz F. Kircher MD, PhD

Moritz Kircher, MD, PhD, is an Associate Member in the Department of Radiology, and an Associate Professor of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Kircher received his MD/PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, in his native country Germany.

Dr. Kircher then moved to the United States to pursue postdoctoral studies with Ralph Weissleder at the Center for Molecular Imaging Research at MGH, where he worked on novel MRI and smart optical nanoprobes for in vivo imaging of cell trafficking and enzyme expression in tumors. He then completed an internship in surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, and a residency in Radiology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, where he also served as chief resident. This was followed by a clinical fellowship in Magnetic Resonance Imaging at Stanford University and a simultaneous postdoctoral fellowship with Sam Gambhir at the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford, where he developed the first triple-modality Raman-MRI-photoacoustic nanoparticle. In September 2010 he was recruited to MSKCC to build up a laboratory focused on nanoparticle-based cancer imaging while seeing patients on the Body Imaging Service. He has received several best paper awards from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), the Lawrie B. Morrison Research Award from Harvard Medical School, an RSNA Research Scholar Award, the Neuroscience Scholar Award from The Dana Foundation, the Young Investigator Award at the 2012 World Molecular Imaging Conference, and the Walter-Friedrich Award from the German Society of Radiology. In 2014, he became the first Radiologist to receive the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award.