Gaia Rizzo was born in Venice in April 3, 1983. She graduated in Information Engineering at the University of Padova in 2007. She received the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering (Bioengineering) from the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova in 2012. From March 2014 she is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova. She was visiting researcher at the Division of Experimental Medicine, Imperial College of London (2008, 2010, 2011), and at the Department of Neuroimaging, King’s College London (2014).

Her research activity covers the following topics: A) quantification of PET images at region and voxel level; B) arterial input function modelling studies; C) correlation of genomic data with PET images of protein density; D) development of methods for the kinetic analysis of ultrasound images.

From 2011 to 2013, she has been project manager in the development of SAKE, a software for the quantification of PET data via Spectral Analysis. SAKE is currently used by 17 research centres worldwide and it is being taught within the course “Experimental Design and Practical Data Analysis in Positron Emission Tomography”, held at King’s College, London.

In 2011, Gaia Rizzo won a Young Researcher Award at the “Veneto Giovani Ricerca Futuro” event. In 2011 and 2012 she was awarded with a ISCBFM Young Investigator travel bursary at the BrainPET2011, and a Student Travel Stipend at the WMIC2012.

She collaborates with the Department of Neuroimaging, IoPPN, King’s College London, UK (Federico Turkheimer, Mattia Veronese, Paul Expert), the Department of Medicine, Imperial College, London, UK, (Jim Myers), the Psychiatry Imaging, Imperial College, London, UK (Peter Bloomfield), the Comprehensive Cancer Imaging Center, Imperial College, London, UK (Eric Aboagye), the Molecular Imaging Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, USA (Masahiro Fujita, Robert Innis) and the University of Bordeaux, CNRS, France (Paolo Zanotti Fregonara).