Joanna Fowler

Joanna Sigfred Fowler (born 9 August 1942) is a scientist emeritus at the Brookhaven National Laboratory of the United States Department of Energy in New York, where she directed the Radiotracer Chemistry, Instrumentation and Biological Imaging Program and served as professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Born in Miami, Florida, she took a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of South Florida in 1964 and her Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Colorado in 1967, and worked at Brookhaven from 1969 until her retirement in January 2014. In 1976 she and her colleagues designed and synthesized a radioactively tagged sugar, fluorine-18 labeled glucose (FDG), which with positron emission tomography lets brain glucose metabolism be measured noninvasively and is now widely used for brain studies and cancer diagnosis. She also developed radiotracers that showed how cocaine is distributed in the human brain and the first radiotracers to map monoamine oxidase. Her honors include the National Medal of Science.