University Times

Chester Mathis, professor of radiology in the School of Medicine, has been named a Distinguished Professor. The rank recognizes extraordinary, international scholarly attainment in an individual discipline or field.

Mathis also holds appointments in pharmaceutical sciences in the School of Pharmacy and in pharmacology and chemical biology in the School of Medicine. He has a longstanding interest in applying synthetic radiochemistry techniques to develop positron emission tomography (PET) radiopharmaceuticals to study brain function in vivo. For more than 30 years, he has focused on the development of radiotracers to image the serotonin and dopamine neuroreceptor systems, as well as agents to evaluate other aspects of normal and abnormal function in the central nervous system.

Mathis’s long partnership with William E. Klunk, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, has yielded Pittsburgh Compound-B (PiB), a fluorescent analog of thioflavin T used to assess beta-amyloid in the living human brain using PET scanning. Using PiB, researchers have detected and quantified amyloid plaques in cognitively normal elderly subjects years before symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease were detectable.