Professor Alexander Hammers

Biography

Alexander Hammers, a Neurologist with a particular interest in epilepsy, is Professor (Honorary Consultant) of Imaging and Neuroscience and Head of the King’s College London & Guy’s and St Thomas’ PET Centre at St Thomas’ Hospital. Other roles include Deputy Director of the Centre for Medical Engineering. He obtained an MD from the RWTH Aachen, Germany, in MR imaging of the hippocampus and a PhD from the University of London in PET investigations in focal epilepsy.

His research area is medical imaging, in particular functional neuroimaging with quantified Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to understand mechanisms of neurological disease. Another area is structural neuroimaging using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and anatomical segmentation using a large manually annotated brain atlas database which his group has created over the past two decades. The main areas of application of his research are the epilepsies and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as methodological developments. The ultimate goal is to benefit individual patients through the clinical application of neuroscience. Examples include classification with machine-learning (artificial intelligence) techniques, and the combination of MRI and PET.

He is affiliated with several professional organisations, has won several distinctions, is a sought-after teacher, and reviews frequently for numerous journals and grant-giving bodies. He is an author on about 300 articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters (Google Scholar).