Researcher profile

Alexander Hammers

Alexander Hammers is a Neurologist with a particular interest in epilepsy. He studied and undertook postgraduate training in Germany, France and Britain. He obtained an MD from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany, for MR imaging of the hippocampus and a PhD from the University of London for PET investigations in focal epilepsy. From 2009 to 2014, he held the Chair of Excellence in Functional Neuroimaging at the Neurodis Foundation in Lyon, France. During that time, he implemented neuroscience techniques for patient care, and successfully led bids that allowed the installation of France’s first simultaneous PET-MR. He is now is Professor (Honorary Consultant) of Imaging and Neuroscience at King’s College and Head of the PET Imaging Centre, installed at St Thomas’ Hospital. His research area is medical imaging, in particular functional neuroimaging with quantified Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to understand mechanisms of neurological disease. Another area is structural neuroimaging using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and anatomical segmentation using a large manually annotated brain atlas database which his group has created over the past decade. The main areas of application of his research are the epilepsies and, more recently, neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal is to benefit individual patients through the clinical application of neuroscience, e.g. through classification with machine-learning techniques, or the combination of MRI and PET. He is affiliated with several professional organisations, has won several distinctions, teaches regularly, reviews frequently for numerous journals and has reviewed for 13 grant-giving bodies in five countries. He is an associate editor for Epileptic Disorders, the Educational Journal of the International League Against Epilepsy, and an author on about 180 articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters.