In 1944 he and his family escaped from Nazi persecution by joining the only ship of refugees to leave from Naples, Italy to the United States during World War II.
[5] After his army service he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, rising to full professor by 1961.
[5] In 1963, he moved to the University of California, San Francisco, as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Radiology, a position he held from 1963 to 1989.
While at UCSF he played an instrumental role building the fields of magnetic resonance and molecular imaging.
When his wife, Hedvig Hricak was made the Chairwoman of Radiology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, he moved to Weill-Cornell in New York in 2000.