Julie C. Price is an American medical physicist and professor of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Medical School (HMS), as well as the director of PET Pharmacokinetic Modeling at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center at MGH. Price is a leader in the study and application of quantitative positron emission tomography (PET) methods. Prior to this, Price worked with Pittsburgh colleagues (Mathis and Klunk) to lead the first fully quantitative pharmacokinetic evaluations of 11C-labeled Pittsburgh compound-B (PIB), one of the most widely used PET ligands for imaging amyloid beta plaques. As a principal investigator at MGH, Price continues work to validate novel PET methods for imaging biological markers of health and disease in studies of aging and neurodegeneration, including studies of glucose metabolism, protein expression, neurotransmitter system function, and tau and amyloid beta plaque burden.
Early life and education Price attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her undergraduate degree. She majored in physics and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1982 with key encouragement from Professor Converse Blanchard. Upon completion of her bachelors, Price stayed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to pursue her master's in medical physics under the mentorship of Professor John Cameron. She worked in the Radiation Calibration Service as a project specialist during her Master's where she explored the efficacy of diode dosimeters used to monitor radiotherapy doses. In 1985, during her Master's training, Price worked as a Summer Physics Research Assistant in the Diagnostic Radiology Department at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, learning to assess the level of radiation exposure to the fetus from multislice CT scans. As a Medical Physicist at George Washington University (1986), she had the opportunity to work with Drs. Reba, Gibson, and Zeeburg on kinetic modeling research. She then pursued her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University within the School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland in the Radiation Health Sciences Program, directed by Dr. Henry N. Wagner Jr. Her graduate advisors were Dr. J. James Frost and Dr. Jonathan Links. Her thesis work focused on quantification of opiate receptor and benzodiazepine receptor concentrations and affinity in vivo in the human brain using PET imaging and 11C-Diprenorphine and 11C-flumazenil, respectively. She later took part in a Yale-JHU collaboration to use Single Photon Emission Tomography to measure Benzodiazepine receptor concentration and affinity in the brains of non-human primates using a constant infusion paradigm, led by Drs. Innis and Laruelle. Price then completed her postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health in the Department of PET and Nuclear Medicine. As a National Research Council fellow under the supervision of Drs. Richard Carson and Stephen Bacharach. She helped to implement a novel method to reduce the transmission noise in 18F-FDG cardiac emission images, based on the use of a model that sharpens the peaks of the measured attenuation histograms of the images to minimize noise.
Career and research Following her postdoctoral training, Price was recruited to the University of Pittsburgh in 1994 as a PET physicist and assistant professor in the PET Facility and Department of Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In 2002, Price was promoted to associate professor and served as Head of PET Methodology at the University of Pittsburgh PET facility, a position she held until 2016. She was awarded tenure in 2006 and promoted to full professor in the Department of Radiology in 2010 and secondarily in the Department of Biostatistics (2013). She also led the Imaging, Methodology and Statistics Core of the Pittsburgh amyloid imaging program project grant (AG025204, Klunk PI) from 2005 to 2016. Over 35 NIH grantome entries are listed for Price, over a 14-year period, for PET imaging investigations of the pharmacokinetic properties of PET ligands and for clinical research applications in aging, neuropsychiatric disorders, and neurodegeneration. In 2016, Price became an Investigator in the Department of Radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Director of PET Pharmacokinetic Modeling at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and Visiting Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. As Professor of Radiology (2017), she continued to pursue AD research with members of the Harvard Aging Brain Study (HABS) and Massachusetts Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. She uses her expertise in PET imaging to foster the development of novel methods to improve the early detection of AD through imaging of tau and amyloid beta plaque deposits. She continues to collaborate with her previous institutions including the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pittsburgh through work done on the NIH Down Syndrome Consortium project or ABC-DS. Price is also on the publication committee for the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, a leading journal in the field. As Principal Investigator of the Price Lab at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, her translational collaborations extend into other areas. These projects include PET imaging to assess epigenetic changes in Huntington's Disease and Parkinson's Disease and developing novel diagnostic methods to measure pathological Tau deposition in the human brain through PET imaging. Her research also addresses race-based differences in disease as she explores the mechanisms of altered peripheral glucose uptake in African American women. She also supports efforts to apply PET imaging to assess the outcomes of meditation on chronic pain and migraines by tracking neuroinflammation using novel PET ligands.
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