Chad Quarles, PhD, is a professor of imaging research in the Neuroimaging Innovation Center in the Department of Translational Neuroscience at Barrow Neurological Institute.

He earned his undergraduate degree in biophysics at Centenary College of Louisiana in 1999 and his doctorate in biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 2004. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cancer imaging at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2006.  Dr. Quarles stayed at Vanderbilt and attained the academic rank of associate professor in the Department of Radiology and the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science.  He joined the faculty at Barrow in 2015.

Dr. Quarles’s research focuses on the development and application of multimodality imaging methods for improved disease characterization. He has a particular interest in leveraging all aspects of imaging science, including image acquisition and formation, contrast mechanisms, and image analysis, to discover novel imaging metrics and expand the clinical utility of bioimaging techniques.

When applied to brain cancer imaging, this philosophy has yielded more robust pulse sequences and postprocessing strategies for clinical perfusion imaging, a more comprehensive characterization of contrast agent induced susceptibility effects, and the new MR-based cytographic imaging technique.

Dr. Quarles’s research has been continuously funded through multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. At the national level, he is involved with initiatives (e.g. the Quantitative Imaging Network, the Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance, and the National Brain Tumor Society) that aim to standardize brain cancer imaging acquisition and analysis methods for clinical trials.