Professor Alexander Hammers

Biography

Alexander Hammers; a Neurologist with a particular interest in epilepsy, is Professor of Imaging and Neuroscience and Head of the King’s College London & Guy’s and St Thomas’ PET Centre at St Thomas’ Hospital. He also serves as Deputy Head of School, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences. 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 decade. The main areas of application of his research are the epilepsies and neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal is to benefit individual patients through the clinical application of neuroscience, e.g. through classification with machine-learning techniques, or the combination of MRI and PET. He is affiliated with several professional organisations, has won several distinctions, teaches regularly, and reviews frequently for numerous journals and grant-giving bodies. He is an author on about 200 articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters (WoS h index 44, Google Scholar 53).