2016 SMRT President’s Award Recipient

This award was established to honor the most outstanding Proffered Paper of the SMRT 25th Annual Meeting.

The recipient of this year’s award
 
Karla Epperson

will be presenting her award-winning paper Saturday, 07 May at 12:50
Reproducibility Technique to Successfully Implement Magnetic Resonance Elastography of the Brain in Routine Clinical Protocol

Karla Epperson, (R)(MR) is a MRI Research Technologist at the Lucas Center for Imaging located at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Radiology. She has over 25 years of experience in health care including MRI, Ultrasound, EEG, Polysomnography, and EKG.

Karla worked as a staff technologist in MRI before beginning her career as a research MRI technologist. She conducts examinations at 3T and 7T whole body scanners utilizing various methods of MRI research including fMRI, Brain and Liver MRE, Focused Ultrasound, Spectroscopy, musculoskeletal, breast and abdominal imaging. Karla provides instruction to researchers in the operation of MRI scanners and ancillary equipment. She provides scanner support and physiologic monitoring for animal model imaging. Karla provides support to engineering in software and hardware troubleshooting. She also has had the opportunity to develop her skills conducting clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations for Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, stroke, Muscular Dystrophy and many more.

Karla has contributed to the SMRT by authoring and co-authoring several abstracts since her initial membership in 2012. In 2014 she won the First Place Research Poster award entitled “Imaging the Thalamus Using a Novel White Matter Nulled Pulse Sequence: Does 7T Improve Image Quality over 3T?”

Karla feels that the best part of her job is helping the patients and researchers, and witnessing the development of health care improvements as they are translated into clinical reality.