Satish Chitneni

Associate Professor
Department of Radiology

Satish Chitneni is a radiopharmaceutical chemist and faculty co-director of the Cyclotron Facility. His research is focused on developing radiolabeled compounds for imaging disease-related biomarkers noninvasively with positron emission tomography (PET). The resulting molecules, called radiopharmaceuticals, can have wide-ranging applications in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancers and in new drug development. His research work is multidisciplinary and involves medicinal chemistry, radiochemistry, and biological evaluation of radiolabeled molecules in preclinical models to advance the agents for human use.

His work has been published in such journals as the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Journal of Nuclear Medicine, Nuclear Medicine and Biology, and Clinical Cancer Research.

Chitneni completed a bachelor of pharmacy and an MS in clinical pharmacy from the Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University in Chennai, India. He earned an MS in pharmaceutical analysis and a PhD in radiopharmaceutical sciences from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Most recently, he was an associate professor of radiology at Duke University Medical Center.