Dr Ellen Grant

Dr. Grant is a Professor of Pediatrics and Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She is the founding Director of the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC), holds the Boston Children’s Hospital endowed chair in Neonatology and serves as a clinical Neuroradiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Grant founded the FNNDSC in 2009 to develop and optimize tools and analysis streams for better detecting and understanding both normal and abnormal brain physiology and development. The primary end goal is to provide mechanistic information that enables optimization of cognitive, behavioral and neurological outcomes in children, with a focus on fetuses, neonates, infants and toddlers.

The three modalities that are being developed in the center are Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). Dr Grant leads a team of MR physicists and engineers doing pulse sequence development and novel MR imaging analysis. Her team built a novel paediatric specific MEG system that is now FDA approved and provides clinical services for presurgical evaluation of infants and toddlers with epilepsy. She is also a pioneer of frequency domain NIRS (FDNIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) which provides bedside measures of cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption. To support the computational needs of complex data analysis, her team has developed a sophisticated computational infrastructure in collaboration with RedHat to facilitate and support deep-learning approaches on large datasets as well as real time data analysis.

The FNNDSC currently has over 60 members with 14 faculty and at least 7 postdoctoral students. Dr. Grant is a Senior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and sits on the Board of Scientific Counselors for National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She was selected to present the Mansfield Lecture at the ISMRM in 2020 and in 2021 she was recognized by the American Society of Neuroradiology with the Outstanding Contributions in Research Award.