Wawrzyniec (Wawosz) Lawrence Dobrucki is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Carle-Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also holds a full-time faculty position at Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology where he serves as co-chair for the Integrative Imaging theme and the Medical University of Gdansk in Poland. He directs the Experimental Molecular Imaging Laboratory (EMIL).
His expertise is in molecular preclinical imaging, and his fields of professional interests include the development of novel targeted multimodal imaging strategies to noninvasively assess tissue microenvironments and various biological processes in vivo, including therapeutic neovascularization, atherosclerosis, neoplastic progression and cancer response to experimental therapies.
Prof. Dobrucki is also involved in translational bioimaging utilizing his 15+ years’ experience in the development and validation of novel SPECT/PET radiotracers and multimodal multifunctional contrast agents. He is an active member of the Preclinical Imaging Task Force at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging charged with the task to develop a preclinical imaging curriculum for medical and bioengineering scientists and to address problems with standardization of small animal imaging protocols. Prof. Dobrucki is a co-founder of a biomedical startup company (PhantomCOR, Inc.) and a scientific consultant for Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure Poland.
Prof. Dobrucki received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Ohio University, Athens, OH in 2003, and an M.Sc. degree in Bioengineering from Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland and Technical University of Hamburg, Germany. Prior to joining the Department of Bioengineering as tenure-track faculty in Fall 2013, Prof. Dobrucki was a junior faculty member at Yale University School of Medicine and Senior Research Scientist at Beckman Institute where he directed the Molecular Imaging Laboratory (MIL) in the Biomedical Imaging Center (BIC).