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About

Steven R. Meikle is a pioneering biomedical imaging researcher whose work has fundamentally advanced the field of positron emission tomography (PET), with a particular focus on motion compensation and awake animal neuroimaging. His most significant contribution lies in developing innovative techniques that eliminate the need for anesthesia during small animal PET scanning — a breakthrough that transforms how researchers study brain disorders such as dementia, depression, and schizophrenia at the molecular level. Meikle's research trajectory moves from early hardware solutions, including a motion-adaptive animal chamber, toward increasingly sophisticated markerless tracking systems using SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms and optical methods. His 2014 paper on markerless motion tracking of awake animals, garnering 49 citations, demonstrated that freely moving animals could be imaged while their behavioral responses were simultaneously recorded — a genuinely transformative methodological advance. His 2018 open-field PET work, cited 33 times, extended this vision further, enabling concurrent neuroimaging and naturalistic behavioral observation. Across his body of work, Meikle has consistently bridged translational neuroscience and imaging physics, pushing PET beyond its traditional constraints and opening new possibilities for studying cognition, pharmacology, and psychiatric illness in more ethologically valid experimental conditions.