Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/17/2025
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
Communicore, C1-004
Abstract: Mitochondria play a crucial role in cellular energy homeostasis and function, making their metabolic activity a key indicator of health and disease. Mitochondrial metabolism is highly sensitive to various factors, including demographics, nutrition, and pathological states, necessitating in vivo investigation. While stable isotope tracing (e.g., using 13C and 15N) is a powerful tool for metabolic analysis, traditional approaches require invasive procedures for ex vivo metabolomics due to sensitivity limitations. Hyperpolarization techniques overcome this limitation by increasing signal sensitivity by several orders of magnitude, enabling real-time in vivo monitoring of substrate metabolism. Complementing this approach, mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) provides spatial information on metabolite distributions within tissues. This presentation will discuss key pathways of mitochondrial metabolism, highlight recent advancements in in vivo metabolic imaging techniques, and present their application in preclinical models and clinical studies with neurological disorders, cardiomyopathies, and metabolic syndromes.
Dr. Park was trained as an Electrical Engineer at Yonsei University in South Korea and Stanford University in the United States. His doctoral work at Stanford was focused on technical developments of MRI and MRSI with application to preclinical brain tumor metabolism. Following completion of his Ph.D. in 2012, he broadened his research into advanced biomedical imaging as a postdoctoral research fellow and a research associate in the Department of Radiology at Stanford School of Medicine. He moved to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 2016 as an Assistant Professor. He has been an Associate Professor of the Advanced Imaging Research Center, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Department of Radiology at UT Southwestern since 2022 when he received his tenure. His lab develops metabolic imaging concepts and methods for assessing in vivo mitochondrial metabolism and imaging metabolic fluxes in enzyme-catalyzed reactions, by developing a network of ideas in MR pulse sequence, image reconstruction, physiology, chemistry, and clinical translation.