Hernan J. Jara, PhD

Associate Professor of Radiology
Director of Research, Department of Radiology
MRI Physicist
Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Phone: (617) 247-3398
Email: hjara@bu.edu
Office: 820 Harrison Ave., Boston, MA 02118

Hernan Jara is a medical imaging physicist and Professor of Radiology at Boston University School of Medicine and Adjunct-Professor of Biomedical Engineering.  After completing his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he received his postdoctoral training in medical imaging at the University of Pennsylvania earning a Training Fellowship in MRI from the NIH.  Dr. Jara was also a postdoctoral Research Associate for two years at the Laboratory for Structural NMR Imaging at the University of Pennsylvania.  He work was in the development of MRI mircoscopy pulse sequences.   He has extensive teaching, curriculum development, and research mentoring experience at the undergraduate (biomedical engineering) and graduate levels (masters students in Bioimaging, medical students, and radiology residents).  Dr. Jara has also extensive experience in radiological research, specifically in the areas of pulse sequence development and image processing, algorithm development for multispectral quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI), for magnetic resonance angiograpy (MRA), and for MRI microscopy. He has pioneered new techniques for virtual MRI-a technique with which MR images of arbitrary contrast weighting can be generated from a single multispectral qMRI scan–being the inventor in three United States patents (US6,823,205 B1, US 6,917,199, and US 7,002,345.  He has also participated in qMRI studies of liver volumetry and cancer diagnosis.