P. Ellen Grant, MD

Dr. Grant is the Käthe Beutler, MD Harvard Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She is the founding Director of the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC) in the Departments of Medicine and Radiology, the Director of Faculty Affairs in the Department of Radiology, the Direct of Research for the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Surgery and a clinical neuroradiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Grant founded the FNNDSC in 2009 to develop and optimize tools and analysis streams to better detect and understand both normal and abnormal brain physiology and development. The primary goal is to provide phenotypic and mechanistic information that enables optimization of cognitive, behavioral, and neurological outcomes in children with a focus on fetuses, neonates, infants, and toddlers. Three modalities are being developed in the FNNDSC: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetoencephalography …(MEG) and quantitative Near Infrared Spectroscopy (qNIRS). She leads a team of MR physicists and engineers doing pulse sequence development and novel MRI analysis at the forefront of fetal and placental MRI. Her team build a novel pediatric specific MEG system that is now FDA approved and provides clinical services for presurgical evaluation of infants and toddlers with epilepsy.
She is a pioneer of frequency domain NIRS (FDNIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) which provides quantitative bedside measures of cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption. To support the computational needs of complex data analysis, her team has developed a sophisticated computational infrastructure in collaboration with RedHat to support deep-learning approaches on large datasets and real time data analysis.
The FNNDSC currently has over 60 members with 17 faculty and 6 postdoctoral students. Dr. Grant is a Senior Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and sits on the Board of Scientific Counselors for National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. In 2021 she received the Outstanding Contributions in Research Award from the American Society of Neuroradiology and in 2022 she received the Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology. She is currently PI/MPI of 6 NIH grants and her center has over $40M of active funding.