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President Biden presented the ARPA-H award to J. Quincy Brown and Brian Summa

Photo of J. Quincy Brown and Brian Summa from news.tulane.edu

Oct 5, 2024, 11:47

President Biden presented the ARPA-H award to J. Quincy Brown and Brian Summa

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited Tulane University to present the new ARPA-H award to J. Quincy Brown and Brian Summa.

The funding for the Tulane award the Bidens announced comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal funding agency established by the Biden Administration to rapidly advance high-potential, high-impact biomedical research that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity.

Tulane researchers will lead a team focused on overcoming the technical computing and engineering challenges to make the advanced imaging device a reality within the next five years. Receiving the full funding amount will require the team to reach certain milestones in their efforts.

J. Quincy Brown obtained his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Louisiana Tech University. He then moved to the Duke University Department of Biomedical Engineering, where he was a postdoctoral NRSA fellow (NCI), eventually being promoted to assistant research professor. During his tenure at Duke, Dr. Brown focused on applications of quantitative tissue spectroscopy and optical imaging for improving breast cancer patient outcomes. This included clinical investigations into the link between molecular subtype and tumor vascular oxygenation in vivo, and the use of quantitative diffuse optical imaging for intraoperative detection of residual cancer on the margins of tumor resection specimens.

Brian Summa is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Tulane University. His research interests are in large data processing, analysis, and interaction for data visualization and computer graphics applications. His work has supported the creation of deployable, large data processing software that scales from mobile devices to supercomputers. His research in visualization is highly interdisciplinary and has allowed him to work closely with researchers in a variety of disciplines such as geology, physics, and neurobiology.

On this Occasion,

“This arrived in my inbox today! It is from the President and Dr. Biden’s visit to Tulane University to announce the new ARPA-H award to J. Quincy Brown and Brian Summa and team for their great work.

Importantly it was perhaps my one opportunity to personally thank the President for the Cancer Moonshot program which has re-imagined how we approach the big job of ending cancer as we know it – a job we are working to do every day for Louisiana and the Gulf South!”