Joanna Sigfred Fowler (born August 9, 1942) is a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
She served as professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine[1] and director of Brookhaven's Radiotracer Chemistry, Instrumentation and Biological Imaging Program.
Fowler's research has led to new fundamental knowledge, development of important scientific tools, and has broad impacts in the application of nuclear medicine to diagnostics and health.
[4] In 1976, Fowler and her colleagues designed and synthesized a radioactively "tagged" form of sugar that is now used widely to study brain function and also to diagnose and plan treatment for cancer.
This positron-emitting molecule, together with positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, has become a mainstay for brain-imaging studies in schizophrenia, aging and cancer.