Meet the Team

Director and Professor Advanced Imaging Research Center
Professor Radiology (secondary appointment)
Diane and Hal Brierley Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Research

Anke Henning, Ph.D., an expert in medical imaging technology development, has been Director of the Advanced Imaging Research Center since January 2019.

A former research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, Dr. Henning has developed novel magnetic resonance imaging methods for noninvasive visualization of disease-related structural, functional, and metabolic changes in the human brain, spinal cord, and heart.

Her expertise is in ultra-high field magnetic imaging technology, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and non-proton imaging. She also directs clinical research with respect to brain imaging in psychiatric disorders, spinal cord imaging in traumatic injury, and imaging of the human heart. At UT Southwestern, Dr. Henning has expanded her research interests as a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar in Cancer Research to include imaging glioblastoma with the ultimate goal of enhancing the treatment of this aggressive, incurable brain cancer.

She obtained a master’s degree in physics from the Technical University of Chemnitz in Germany and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (also known as Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or ETH). She remained at the ETH for postdoctoral training and soon became project leader of the MR Spectroscopy activities. During that time, she also spent a short-term stay as a visiting scientist in the Department of Radiology at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She joined the Max Planck Institute in 2012 and in 2017 was made a full Professor of Medical Physics at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany.