Saturday, March 9, 2019
Symposium Facilitators
Cathy Cutler
MIRP Director, Brookhaven National Laboratory
How a farm girl became a scientist and impacted patient's lives
Dr Cathy Cutler is the Director of the Medical Isotope Research and Production Program (MIRP), at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Her research on the development and evaluation of radiopharmaceuticals focuses on facilitating the development of new radiopharmaceuticals to enhance personalized treatments of metastatic cancer. The typical radiopharmaceutical works by combining a radioactive isotope with a specially designed organic molecule or a biological targeting molecule. Once inside the body, the targeting compound takes control, guiding the isotope to the cancerous site where the isotope decays, enabling either diagnosis or ablation of the cell. The challenge, particularly in therapy, is ensuring enough dose to the tumor cells to cause destruction before the effects on normal cells and toxicity become too high.
Until 2015 Dr. Cutler worked at the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center where she led the Radiopharmaceuticals Group. Dr. Cutler is Chair of the Committee on Radiopharmaceuticals of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) and sits on the executive board of directors of the Society of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences. She is also a board member of the Therapy Center of Excellence and the Center for Molecular Imaging Innovation and Translation.
Shobhana Narashima
Dean Academic Affairs, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientitfic Research, Bangalore, India
Changing Sizes and a Changing World: Stories from an Indian Woman Nanoscientist
I will talk about how and why I became a scientist, growing up in India. I will also talk about my work as a computational nanoscientist, designing new materials on the computer: one atom at a time, with the periodic table of the elements as my Lego box. I am interested in how the properties of matter change as its dimensions become smaller and smaller, down to the nanoscale. These novel properties allow us to design innovative miniaturised devices that are expected to change our lives in the near future.
Shobhana Narasimhan is a theoretical physicist working in the area of computational nanoscience. Her group uses the techniques of quantum mechanical density functional theory to design novel nanomaterials. Shobhana grew up in Bombay, India, where she went to school and college. After obtaining a PhD in physics at Harvard University, she was a postdoc at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, Germany. Since 1996 she has been on the faculty of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India, where she has also been Chair of the Theoretical Sciences Unit and Dean of Academic Affairs. She has an active interest in women in science: she has conducted several workshops for women in physics, was a member of the Working Group on Women in Physics of IUPAP, and is currently a member of the Standing Committee on Women in Science of the Government of India. She has also taught physics in many developing countries in Asia and Africa.
Carolina Jimenez Garcia
Senior Layout Artist en ScanlineVFX, Vancouver, Canada
Women in film industry - Our presence in the art and technology of filmmaking
We'll discuss the role of women in the film industry throughout the history of filmmaking, from the first women pioneers in the history of cinema to today's situation in the field around me. I'll go through my career experience since I first started and try to analyze the whats and whys. And we'll try to shed some optimistic light on how to get to a more equal path all in the technical and artistic world of movie making.
Carolina Jimenez is a visual effects artist in the film industry. She started studying architecture in Spain, her home country, but the digital technology of computer graphics rapidly caught her attention and became her preferred career path and profession. She's lived in countries like UK, Australia or New Zealand and now resides in Vancouver, Canada. She's worked on many movies including The Hobbit trilogy, Star Trek Beyond, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol2, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes or Justice League. Her passion for science popularization and for educating in VFX and filmmaking has made her a blogger, a Youtube teacher and an international speaker for film festivals and educational institutions. A good part of the material she creates is Spanish, her mother tongue. This has made her educational activity of special relevance in Latin America, where educational material is not always available or affordable for young enthusiasts, specially girls and women in need of role models and career mentorship.
