Abass Alavi: A giant in Nuclear Medicine turns 80 and is still going strong

Little was written in the stars above the city of Tabriz in Iran on March 15, 1938 indicating that a newborn citizen would immigrate to America and become a master of modern mo-lecular imaging with a sharp focus on F-FDG PET to the benefit of millions of people around the world. Nonetheless, that's what happened. A gifted boy who lost his farther early and grew up with his uneducated mother and two siblings in humble circumstances to become a premium student, nationally no. 1 in mathematics while in school, and later a medical doctor before he decided in 1966 to seek his fortune in the US. Here he started education in internal medicine, hematology and oncology, albeit found this unsatisfactory due to tradition and rote learning. He turned to radiology and nuclear medicine in a search for new knowledge and better methods to benefit patients and society, an attitude he had been taught from early childhood. The very same attitude has been the beacon for Alavi's activities throughout his professional life, instead of money, power and social status. He married into a highly academic environment. His wife, Jane Bradley Alavi, was a specialist in hematology and oncology and is still his life partner. They never had children, so their many students and the numerous medical doctors, physicists and other academics they coached became their family. While Jane Alavi retired some years ago, Abass Alavi continued his professional career and has no plans of retirement when he turns 80 on March 15, 2018 after 46 years in nuclear medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and with an admirable network of pupils and colleagues across all five continents. On the contrary, Alavi has probably never been busier, his scientific work goes on, his multinational scientific "family" steadily increases all over the world as does the appli-cation of PET in the shape of PET/CT or PET/MRI. Alavi's contributions to the scientific literature has more than doubled within the last decade making him one of the most cited researchers at the University of Pennsylvania with a production of more than 1,200 articles, a similar number of published abstracts and close to 58,000 citations according to Google Scholar, of which about 20,000 since 2012 when he was 74. This is just part of an amazing story. Having turned to nuclear medicine in 1971, Alavi entered into one of the World's most ingenious and productive medical research en-vironments comprising collaboration of experts in nuclear medicine (