Nathalie Agar

Nathalie Y.R. Agar, Ph.D. is the Daniel E. Ponton Distinguished Chair in Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Agar’s multidisciplinary training includes a B.Sc. in Biochemistry, Ph.D. in Chemistry, a postdoctoral fellowship in Neurology and Neurosurgery from McGill University, and further postdoctoral training in Neurosurgery at BWH/HMS. From this unique background, she has developed distinct skills to address unmet analytical needs in the clinical environment. She has also developed a network of specialists to satisfy the many different aspects of translational research activities.

Her research focuses on the development and implementation of integrated biomolecular and drug imaging of tissue specimens for improved biochemical classifications. Her laboratory focuses on the mass spectrometry imaging of drugs and metabolism from pre-clinical animal models and clinical trial specimens to investigate new therapeutics. She is also developing and validating real time molecular imaging approaches to support surgical decision making. Her overall goals are to enable surgeons and oncologists to tailor treatment from the time of surgery, support the development of new therapeutics, and allow precision cancer care using molecular imaging approaches.