About

A. Dean Sherry has an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Wisconsin State University, LaCrosse and a Ph.D. in physical-inorganic chemistry from Kansas State University in 1971.

He was awarded a NIH postdoctoral fellowship to study with Dennis Darnall at New Mexico State University. They were among the first to use lanthanide ions as spectroscopic probes of protein structure. He joined chemistry faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1972 where he currently holds a Cecil & Ida Green Distinguished Chair in Systems Biology. He was involved with the early development of gadolinium complexes as MRI contrast agents in the 1980s and now works on next generation “smart” agents and other MR technologies (CEST and hyperpolarization) for reporting biological function in tissues by MRI. He has a long-standing collaboration with Craig Malloy, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine and Radiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center on the use of 13C tracers and 13C NMR to measure metabolic fluxes in vivo.

In 2005, he was named Director of the newly established Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC) on the campus of UT Southwestern. Today, AIRC scientists eagerly await their first clinical metabolic imaging studies of hyperpolarized 13C tracers in patients. He has published 430 scientific article and was recently honored with two Gold Medal Awards in recognition of his research contributions from the World Molecular Imaging Society (WMIS) in 2013 and from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in 2015.

His research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the American Diabetes Association, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, and the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). He is the scientific founder of two Dallas-based biotech companies, Macrocyclics in 1993 and VitalQuan in 2015.