Joel & Clifton Lecture 2026 | David Hawkes & Elizabeth Powell

You are warmly invited to join us for our annual Joel Lecture, which this year will include our Clifton Lecture, delivered by our current John Clifton Postdoctoral Fellow. Hosted by the Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, this year’s talks are highlights of the Faculty’s UCL 200 celebrations.

This year’s Joel lecture will be celebrating the career and research of Professor David Hawkes:

From Rock and Roll to Sailing in the Rain: Via Fifty Years of Medical Imaging and Surgical Sciences

Reluctantly abandoning his career in rock-and-roll and inspired by the mathematics of reconstruction in computed tomography, Dave Hawkes started working in medical imaging as a hospital-based clinical scientist. Working in the clinical environment demonstrated how much in medicine was unknown, but real impact requires close collaboration between academia, health care providers, and industry. The patient also has a voice that needs to be heard to direct scarce resource to problems that matter.

His career started just as X-ray CT was becoming widely available. His PhD made use of one of the world’s first two whole body CT scanners. Realising that processing information from Medical Images was the future, he formed the Computational Imaging Sciences Group (CISG) at Guy’s Hospital (later KCL) and subsequently the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) at UCL. Combining multiple modalities probing different aspects of structure and function led to the need to tackle image registration. With integration of real-time imaging and video, this led naturally to work on image-guided interventions and ultimately the foundation of the Welcome EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS). His group developed one of the first surgical implementations of augmented reality in surgery, and led to advances in interventions in the prostate, breast, liver, colon, lung and neurosurgery. Close collaboration with pathologists resulting from work with surgeons led to efforts to relate the macroscopic (millimeter) scale of medical imaging to the microscopic world of histology, where cancer and other diseases are ultimately diagnosed and staged. This story ends just as machine learning and artificial intelligence take off, and with promises of a revolution as profound as that which occurred in the early days of digital medical imaging.

There are many frustrations and failures in a research career in a rapidly evolving field, but this experience inspires what to do next, with the ultimate exhilaration of eventually making ideas work. Everything is collaborative, involving many disciplines. Dave has been fortunate to be inspired by some giants in the field. He gratefully acknowledges the many students, post-docs, clinicians, visiting scientists and the faculty that have made this all possible, along with the long term support of our funders. This area is truly multidisciplinary and medicine by its nature crosses all international boundaries. It has been an exciting and rewarding journey.

Meet the expert

Professor David Hawkes, FInstP, FREng, FMedSci

Professor David Hawkes is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London (UCL). He founded the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) in 2005 and served as its director until 2015, and was the director of the Welcome EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) 2018-2019. Previously, he was the Chair of the Division of Imaging Sciences at King’s College London (2002–2004).

His career in medical imaging spans 50 years in hospital-based clinical sciences as well university based research. His research has focused on image registration, data fusion, visualization, shape representation, surface geometry, modelling of tissue deformation, and disease progression modelling, with the aim of advancing medical imaging as a precise measurement tool for staging disease and for image-guided interventions. Professor Hawkes has contributed to research on various diseases, including cancer of the breast, prostate, liver and brain, lung disease and neurodegenerative diseases. He has co-authored over 500 peer-reviewed scientific publications. 

He has always worked closely with industry and mentors entrepreneurship in medical technologies. He has encouraged the formation and development of a number of successful companies. 

He has received numerous awards for his contributions, including Fellowships from the Academy of Medical Sciences (2011), the MICCAI Society (2009), the Royal Academy of Engineering (2002) and the Institute of Physics (1997). He received the Institute of Physics Peter Mansfield Prize for Medical Physics (2019), the MICCAI Society Enduring Impact Award (2016) the Crookshank Medal from the Royal College of Radiologists (2008), NIHR Senior Investigator (2009) and gave the Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen Honorary Lecture at the European Congress of Radiology (2006). 

The Joel Chair

The Joel Chair is the oldest established Chair in Medical Physics in the world. It is currently held by Prof Robert Speller of UCL Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering.

The Joel Lecture Series is free to attend and open to all. You don’t have to be a UCL staff member or student to come along.

A drinks reception in the Winter Garden (also at the Institute for Child Health) will follow, to which everyone is welcome to join. We look forward to meeting you there!

The John Clifton Postdoctoral Fellowship Talk with Dr Elizabeth Powell

Dr Powell was awarded the John Clifton Postdoctoral Fellowship in summer 2025. Dr Powell gained her PhD in magnetic resonance physics at the NMR Research Unit at the Institute of Neurology, UCL. In 2019, she joined the Quantitative Imaging Group (QIG) at the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC), UCL, as a Research Fellow to work on the development of water exchange MRI methods for quantifying blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability. She has been a Senior Research Fellow in 2023.

Dr Powell’s talk will reflect on how the Fellowship has impacted her work.

Photography

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