Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Physics Mentoring Faculty

Dr. Mustafa has obtained his Ph.D. in medical physics from Surrey University, England, UK. His past hospital and academic carriers include faculty positions at Kuwait University School of Medicine, New York Medical College, and currently at Yale University School of Medicine.  He is Yale New Haven Health System chief of diagnostic radiology physics and program director of Yale Medical Physics residency program. Dr. Mustafa is board certified by the American Board of Radiology (ABR) and the American Board of medical Physics (ABMP) in diagnostic imaging physics.  Dr. Mustafa is an elected Fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. For many years he served as member, co-chair or chair of several AAPM scientific and professional committees. Dr Mustafa is examiner with the American Board of Radiology in diagnostic imaging physics conducting Part 3 oral examination since 2004.  He is Chairman of the Accreditation Committee and the Chief Examiner for the International Medical Physics Certification Board (IMPCB). His current clinical, teaching and research interests include image quality optimization, radiation dose management and quantification of disease conditions using multiple imaging modalities with particular interest in CT imaging. Currently leading a team of medical physicists and collaborating with scientists, radiologists and clinicians in areas of CT detection, quantification and optimization Established Yale Diagnostic Medical Physics Residency under GMEC of Yale New Haven Hospital.  He is currently the residency program director.

Ishtiaq Bercha is a dual board certified medical physicist (Non-ionizing, X-ray and Nuclear Medicine Physics) who holds master of science degrees in electrical engineering from University of Colorado, Denver & in medical & radiation physics from University of Birmingham, UK.  He did his residency training in Diagnostic Medical Physics from Uni. of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.  He provides clinical imaging physics support to radiology and biomedical imaging department at Yale New Haven Health & participates in clinical studies.

Kevin was the first resident in the Yale Diagnostic Medical Residency program, starting in February 2019. He successfully completed the program in February 2021. In March 2021, he joined the YDMP faculty. He looks forward to being an active contributor to resident education and experience, and also to delivering high quality services to Radiology and to patients.Before joining the YDMPR program, Kevin completed a Ph.D. in physics at Johns Hopkins University and a post-doctoral certificate in Medical Physics at Virginia Commonwealth University. As a resident, he worked on clinical research projects involving diagnostic display quality control, CT dosimetry, patient shielding, and patient-specific technique charts in mobile and pediatric radiography. Several of these projects were presented as posters and a presentation at meetings of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the Radiological Society of North America. He is particularly interested in CT, MRI, and fluoroscopy, protocol management and optimization, and applying physics and mathematics to address practical problems. In addition to clinical duties, he enjoys and is active in resident education, and brings his recent experience as a resident to his position as Assistant Program Director for first-year residents in the YDMPR program.Dr. Grizzard is board certified in Diagnostic Medical Physics by the American Board of Radiology.

Chi Liu received his Ph.D. in 2008 from Johns Hopkins University with emphasis on quantitative SPECT/CT imaging. Following his graduate work, he was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Washington, specializing in oncological PET/CT studies with emphasis on compensation algorithms for respiratory motion. In 2010, he joined Yale University as a faculty member. He is board certified in Nuclear Medicine physics and instrumentation by the American Board of Science in Nuclear Medicine. His current research focuses on quantitative cardiac and oncological PET/CT and SPECT/CT imaging, including deep learning algorithms, reconstruction algorithms, data correction, dynamic imaging, and translational imaging. The translational and clinical applications of these projects include early detection of chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity, multimodality imaging of heart failure, and eliminating respiratory motion variability for assessing response to therapy. Many of the imaging technologies developed in his lab has been or is being implemented in clinical PET and SPECT scanners. In 2012, he was awarded with the Bruce Hasegawa Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award from the IEEE Nuclear Medical and Imaging Sciences Council for “contributions to the imaging physics of SPECT/CT and PET/CT, with emphasis in quantitative imaging and motion correction”. He was the President of Physics, Instrumentation, and Data Sciences Council (PIDSC) of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) between 2022-2023, is currently the Immediate Past President of PIDSC.

Dana C. Peters is Professor in Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale and responsible for body and cardiac MR at the Magnetic Resonance Research Center, with a secondary appointment in Biomedical Engineering. Early training and discoveries: She received her undergraduate degree in Physics at the Johns Hopkins University, her PhD in Physics at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she first demonstrated the utility of undersampled radial imaging. Her postdoc was at NIH, NHLBI, working in the laboratory of cardiac energetics. Following this, she was Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, working at the BIDMC Cardiac MR Center. Her expertise is in cardiovascular MR, obtained during the last decade,  working with cardiologists to improve detection of heart disease. This work has led to new frontiers in the application of MRI to electrophysiology, by demonstrating that scar can be visualized in the left atrium, due to RF ablation, or due to structural remodeling pre-ablation.Recent focus: Continuing in these directions, the cardiac MR group develops new MRI tools for evaluating cardiac function, strain, flow, pressure, and tissue characterizations, with research to investigate the arrhythmic substrate in the left atrium in patients with atrial fibrillation, or who are likely to develop atrial fibrillation.  One focus of research is on diastolic dysfunction (i.e. high pressures in the heart)  that both correlates atrial fibrosis and remodeling on one hand, and possibly results in atrial arrhythmia. Based on this, a new direction is to evaluate and characterize heart chamber pressures based on functional metrics, including strain, MRI-derived E/e', and flow metrics. Her group has also worked to develop new MRI methods to characterize liver cancer, and is currently working on new methods for deuterium metabolic imaging, also applied to cancer imaging. Mentoring:  Peters is also committed to training a new generation of biomedical imaging scientists. She believes in providing an environment with excellent MRI resources, knowledge about state-of-the-art methods, and important questions in collaboration with clinicians and scientists, to generate creative new solutions in medical imaging.