Dr. Whitney received a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Performing & Visual Arts from King College in Bristol, TN, followed by a Master of Science in Medical Physics from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Master of Physics and PhD in Physics from Vanderbilt University with John Gore as her advisor. While at Vanderbilt, she trained and conducted research at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science and additionally collaborated with faculty in the Department of Radiation Oncology. 

 Before joining the University of Chicago full time as a research assistant professor of radiology in July 2022, Heather was a physics professor to undergraduate students, most recently at a small liberal arts college for 12 years. There she mentored and taught students across the physics curriculum while fostering an NIH-funded research program in medical imaging (including collaborating with investigators at the University of Chicago). Several of her students have gone on to training and employment in medical physics, and she continues to cheer them on.

Working with magnetic fields has been a theme of Dr. Whitney’s training and experience. In high school, she worked on non-destructive testing of automotive parts using magnetic fields, then moved on to biomagnetism projects during two undergraduate summer research periods. In medical imaging, she’s done everything from running animal magnetic resonance imaging systems to manually tuning and matching spectrometers to investigating radiation damping to conducting research in artificial intelligence using radiomic features extracted from magnetic resonance images. 

Heather and her husband (also a Dr. Whitney) are the proud parents of two boys. The family is all about physics: her husband also has a PhD in physics (theoretical particle physics) and the boys are both named after famous physicists. As a family, they enjoy building things and visiting museums and parks.

Tessa Cook, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and Vice Chair of Practice Transformation in the Department of Radiology. She is an active member of multiple radiology societies, including the RSNA, ACR, SIIM, and AUR. She is the director of the Imaging Informatics Fellowship and Modality Chief of 3-D and Advanced Imaging. Dr. Cook is the Chair of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). In 2020, she was inducted into the College of SIIM Fellows and received SIIM’s Dr. Ruth Dayhoff Award for the Advancement of Women in Medical Imaging Informatics. She pursues innovative methods to enhance care delivery in radiology and improve radiologists' workflow. Through the MIDRC Consortium, Dr. Cook and her team realized a years-long goal of developing a highly accurate de-identification tool for radiology reports and other medical text. She hopes that this energizes data sharing and multi-center AI development for NLP in radiology.

Dr. Cook lives with her husband and two daughters in suburban Philadelphia. She’s learning how to take better selfies with two little kids and hoping to get back to playing tennis again this summer.

Caroline Chiles, MD, is an American College of Radiology® (ACR®) COVID-19 Imaging Research Registry™ (CIRR) Site Principal Investigator (PI) and Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC) Site PI at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. She is also Co-PI of a MIDRC research project, “Value of chest radiography in predicting outcomes among hospitalized COVID-19 patients: a virtual clinical trial.”

Chiles served as the Thoracic Imaging Chair for ECOG-ACRIN for many years and is a member of the NCI Thoracic Malignancy Steering Committee. She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Thoracic Radiology (STR) from 2016 to 2020 and served as President of the Society of Thoracic Radiology in 2019 and 2020. In 2019, she initiated the STR Resident Bootcamp, which now takes place each year in conjunction with the STR annual meeting. In March 2023, she was awarded the STR Lifetime Achievement Award. Chiles has been a frequent lecturer at, not only the STR, but also the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and American Roentgen Ray Society annual meetings. In 1987, she was the first recipient of the RSNA Research Scholar Award.

Chiles was a site PI for the National Lung Screening Trial. The study findings reveal that participants who received low-dose helical CT scans had a 15–20% lower risk of dying from lung cancer than participants who received standard chest X-rays. This is equivalent to approximately three fewer deaths per 1,000 people screened in the CT group. In addition, Chiles was PI of an NIH R01 grant, Implementation of Smoking Cessation Services within NCI NCORP Community Sites with Organized Lung Cancer Screening Programs.

When not working, Chiles enjoys spending time with her husband, Willis Slane, and their four springer spaniels. They spend their summers at Ocracoke Island, NC, where she is able to telework thanks to a remote workstation. They also take their dogs on cross country camping trips each year in their Airstream trailer — their “dogs across America” tours.

Chiles completed her Diagnostic Radiology residency at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and her cardiothoracic imaging fellowship at Duke University Hospital, and her primary academic appointment is as Professor of Radiology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. She has authored more than 140 journal articles and 27 book chapters, co-edited one textbook and has served as guest editor for three journals.