PAULA JACOBS
ACTING ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
CONTACT INFORMATION
National Cancer Institute
9609 Medical Center Dr., MSC 9727
For USPS: Bethesda, MD 20892-9727
For Express and Courier: Rockville, MD 20850
Phone: 240-276-5059
Fax: 240-276-5827
Email: jacobsp@nih.gov
Paula M. Jacobs, PhD is Acting Associate Director, Radiation Research Program, Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnostics at the National Cancer Institute and an Adjunct Investigator at the NCI Center for Cancer Research. Dr. Jacobs received her undergraduate degree in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduate degrees at Tufts University and Northeastern University. Her post-doctoral training was at Northeastern University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Peter Bent Brigham Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
Her responsibilities in the Radiation Research Program include oversight of an extramural grant program in radiation research, including external radiation therapy, radiation biology and radiopharmaceuticals for targeted radiation therapy.
She is a member of the FDA Medical Imaging Drugs Advisory Committee and on steering/advisory committees for the Integrated Canine Data Commons, the Small Animal Imaging Program at Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and the NIBIB Medical Imaging Data Resource Center. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Academic Radiology and the SNMMI Artificial Intelligence Task Force. She also directs a radiochemistry facility that prepares pre-clinical and early clinical radiopharmaceuticals in support of therapeutic drug development and characterization of patient derived xenograft models of cancer.
Prior to this, she was Associate Director, Cancer Imaging Program, where she oversaw an extramural grant program in the areas of molecular imaging, nanotechnology, image guided interventions, imaging technology, and clinical trials in imaging. She also focused on lowering the logistical and regulatory barriers to investigational use of PET radiopharmaceuticals for therapeutic drug development, developed the Cancer Imaging Archive, a publicly available image archive with associate clinical meta-data for imaging-genomic correlations and development of computer-aided diagnosis software, and encouraged standardization of imaging techniques and quantitative image methods for use in clinical trials.
She joined the NCI after 30 years of diverse experience in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Her last industrial position was Vice President of Development at Advanced Magnetics where she was a key developer of ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles as magnetic resonance imaging agents and iron replacement therapeutics.
She has published in the areas of organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, magnetic resonance imaging, PET imaging, regulatory affairs, neuro-oncology, and nephrology.