Background
Dr. Sanjay Kumar Jain is a Professor of Pediatrics, Radiology and Radiological Science. He is also a Professor of International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. His areas of clinical expertise include infectious diseases and international health and pediatric infectious disease.
Dr. Jain serves as the director of the Center for Infection and Inflammation Imaging Research. He also directs the Pediatric Infectious Diseases fellowship program which is supported by a NIH T32 award.
Born in Halifax, Canada, Dr. Jain grew up in India. He received his medical degree in 1999 from All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, where he was a house officer in neuroradiology. He trained in pediatrics at Penn State Children’s Hospital, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and the Tufts University School of Medicine. He was a clinical fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins before joining its faculty in 2005. Dr. Jain was named an associate professor of pediatrics in 2011 and professor of pediatrics, radiology and radiological science in 2017.
The major focus of Dr. Jain’s research is the development of imaging technologies for infections, with a special emphasis on bacteria and high-containment pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis (causative agent of tuberculosis) and recently SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Jain’s laboratory utilizes small animal models to develop and test novel radiopharmaceutical imaging methods (CT, PET, SPECT) to diagnose and monitor infections and to study disease pathogenesis. They have the unique capacity to image animals infected with high-containment pathogens (up to biosafety level-3). Several novel tracers developed in his laboratory are now being tested in first-in-human studies. Dr. Jain is also involved with developing innovative technologies to improve childhood immunizations and health of young children in the developing world.
Dr. Jain is funded through several grants. Notably, he is also the recipient of the prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2009) and the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2014). Dr. Jain is the current chair of the Infectious Diseases subgroup at the World Molecular Imaging Society and serves as a reviewer for multiple scientific journals and NIH study panels.