The Department of Radiological Sciences is pleased to announce the addition of new faculty, Dr. Daniel Margolis, Assistant Professor of Radiology. Dr. Margolis earned his medical degree from University of Southern California School of Medicine, followed by an internship in internal medicine at West Los Angeles Veteran's Administration Hospital. He completed his residency in Diagnostic Radiology at UCLA, and a prestigious fellowship funded by the National Cancer Institute at Stanford University.

During his fellowship years, Dr. Margolis' main areas of research were in advanced cancer imaging, including colon cancer detection, prostate cancer characterization, investigating new MRI techniques in vascular imaging, and the use of MRI to predict which breast cancer patients would respond to chemotherapy. After completing his fellowship, Dr. Margolis spent a year and a half in private practice in the East San Francisco Bay area, where he established the first 64-slice coronary CT program in Contra Costa county at the John Muir Medical Center in Concord, CA. He also set about revamping advanced CT and MRI protocols for his group before returning to UCLA.

Dr. Margolis' clinical expertise is in prostate magnetic resonance imaging, colon cancer screening, and using non-invasive medical imaging as a "surrogate biomarker" for drug development. Working closely with his colleagues in Interventional Radiology at UCLA, Dr. Margolis provides a liaison between clinical researchers and medical imaging, and provides his expertise in advanced cancer imaging to research new imaging techniques as potential surrogate biomarkers to determine which new drug therapies are effective weeks or months before their effect is clinically evident. This will allow cancer specialists to determine if their therapy is working, or if another therapy is needed, after only one or two doses. Eventually, these thechniques may be able to determine which therapy is optimal for tumors otherwise similar in size and appearance on CT even before the first dose is given.