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News & EventsPhysics Nobel Laureate Russell Hulse NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. (July 9, 2007) – Aurora Imaging Technology, Inc., manufacturer of the Aurora® 1.5Tesla Dedicated Breast MRI System, today named Nobel Laureate Professor Russell A. Hulse its newest advisory board member. Dr. Hulse recently retired as a principal research physicist after 30 years at the U.S. Department of Energy Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University, and is now a regental professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Hulse also is a member of the Board of Directors at Battelle, a $3 billion annual revenue global science and technology enterprise that develops and commercializes technology and manages laboratories for customers. “Although the mission of Aurora is to detect and fight breast cancer, the means is undoubtedly high technology,” said Olivia Ho Cheng, president and chief executive officer, Aurora. “With this in mind, we are constantly in search of the best scientific and technological minds to assist us in our mission, whether carried out in hardware or software. Having Dr. Hulse, a scientist of impeccable credentials, especially in numerical modeling, is a tremendous boost of the company’s ongoing research and development to further our technology.” Fighting breast cancer is not only a matter of early detection, but also involves an understanding of its genesis. One area of particular interest is to carry out so-called “outcome analysis,” namely a sophisticated data-mining process to seek correlations within the data. An obstacle to executing such analysis is the consistency of the collected data. To this end, one of the primary strengths of the Aurora MRI System is that not only can it accurately collect the data, but that the data also is collected in a consistent manner. The result of this consistency is that the data has identical protocol, whether it is collected from Taiwan, Italy or Massachusetts. “Throughout my career, I have always been profoundly intrigued by innovative technologies,” said Dr. Hulse. “I am especially interested when the technologies can have significant impact on the ills of humanity, in this case, the ever more menacing disease known as breast cancer. The Aurora System is an impressive example of high technology being used to make a major advance in women’s health.” In 1993, Dr. Hulse and his colleague Dr. Joseph Taylor, also from Princeton University, were awarded the ultimate scientific accolade, the Nobel Prize in physics, for their ground breaking discovery of the first “binary pulsar,” a celestial system that has provided important observational confirmations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They did the work in the early 1970s when both were with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Taylor as a young assistant professor and Hulse a graduate student. The research, which led to the discovery of the binary pulsar, was completed at one of the world’s most advanced radio astronomy observatories at the time, located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. In order to conduct research, Dr. Hulse needed to develop novel numerical analysis algorithms using the best computational technology available to him at the time to help him find “a needle in a haystack,” said a fellow Aurora Scientific Advisory Board member, Professor Da Hsuan Feng, also of the University of Texas at Dallas, and a fellow physicist. “It is remarkable, and a little amusing, that this ‘side’ expertise of Dr. Hulse, which is one of the reasons for his lifetime interest in high performance computing, numerical modeling, data-mining, and more recently, system engineering, can and will play a major role in Aurora’s mission in fighting this horrible disease,” said Dr. Feng. “I look forward to contributing to this lofty goal!” concluded Dr. Hulse. About Aurora Imaging Technology, Inc. Media Contact: |
