This will be held via zoom. If you'd like a link, please email chem-admin@uiowa.edu

Title: "Educating the next generation of adjacent lanthanide separation and radiopharmaceutical scientists at the University of Wisconsin"

Abstract: Radionuclides of the rare earth elements, including the lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium are useful for a wide range of nuclear medicine applications. This includes both diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals due to the wide variety of radioactive decay modes (β–, β+, electron capture, alpha) that are found within this portion of the nuclide chart. In the United States, the production and isolation of radiolanthanides occur at a wide variety of facilities – low energy biomedical cyclotrons, high energy proton linear accelerators, and low to moderate flux University research fission reactors. In nearly all cases, the biomedical applications necessitate the chemical isolation of the produced radionuclides from macroscopic amounts of the adjacent lanthanide element used as neutron- or proton-irradiation targets. In this presentation, Dr. Ellison will discuss his laboratory’s development of practical adjacent lanthanide separation methodologies for producing preclinically useful quantities of ¹⁶⁵Er and ¹⁶¹Tb. Additionally, he will use this research as a preamble to introduce the horizon-broadening isotope production pipeline opportunities (HIPPO) program, a multi-University, multi-National Laboratory workforce development educational effort for undergraduate and graduate students.

About the speaker: Paul Ellison received a BS in Chemistry and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2006 and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Returning to Madison, he completed postdoctoral training in Radiological Sciences in 2015 and served as an assistant scientist until 2020, when he was appointed as an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin Department of Medical Physics. Dr. Ellison is trained in nuclear and radiochemistry and his research interests include the synthesis and preclinical evaluation of theranostic radiopharmaceuticals for use in nuclear medicine. Working closely with collaborators in medical physics, radiology, obstetrics and gynecology, and radiation medicine, his laboratory vertically integrates the radiopharmaceutical development process – from radionuclide production to radiopharmaceutical synthesis, to radiobiological evaluation. His group has been funded by the Department of Defense, the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, National Institute of Health and industrial research partners to investigate novel theranostic radiopharmaceuticals for cancers with especially challenging outcomes: metastatic ovarian cancer, neuroblastoma, and glioblastoma. He is passionate about facilitating hands-on, experimental research experiences to undergraduate and graduate students through his involvement with a Department of Energy funded national workforce development program focused on radionuclide production.