Dr. Kim Desmond is a staff scientist with the Brain Health Imaging Centre at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). She is also an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in medical biophysics in 2014, specializing in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) physics, with work focusing on saturation transfer contrast methods for imaging mobile proteins and lipids, and examining the structural integrity of myelin, in an array of applications including cancer and neurodegeneration. Her postdoctoral work was performed at McMaster University where she optimized MRI sequences for imaging brain xenografts and demyelination models in mice, with a focus on inversion recovery T1 and magnetization transfer.
Areas of Research
Dr. Desmond's research interests focus on development of mathematical models and optimization of quantitative imaging metrics, in magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET).
At CAMH, she has helped to establish an imaging protocol for efficient human quantitative magnetization transfer MRI and implemented MR imaging protocols on the preclinical PET/MR.
Currently, as a member of core staff at the imaging centre, she is responsible for optimal operation of the PET scanners and auxiliary equipment (well counters, dose calibrators, and automated blood samplers), scanner calibration and quality assurance, analysis methods for arterial blood measurements, and development and implementation of acquisition and processing protocols for new PET radiotracers, analysis techniques and data pipelines.
Publications
Dr. Desmond's publications can be viewed on Google Scholar.