CELEBRATING THE SYNERGY BETWEEN INDUSTRY AND ACADEMIA
Frank H. Low
The focus of this festschrift is to celebrate and acknowledge a career that has spanned more than 50 years and is representative of those in industry who have enhanced the contributions of academia. His support of the symposium entitled “Dynamic Function Studies with Radioisotopes” lead to the development of the first Nuclear Medicine Division at Harvard Medical School in the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from MIT and Harvard and an MBA from Harvard, Frank joined one of the first commercial nuclear instrument companies formed after the Manhattan Project. He soon developed a specific interest in the use of nuclear technology in medicine and began to work closely with the early practitioners of Nuclear Medicine. In 1957 he was asked to manage Picker Nuclear, the first industrial operation dedicated entirely to the collaboration of industry and academia in the Nuclear Medicine field.
After the head office of Picker moved to Cleveland Frank broadened his perspective by becoming VP of a medical venture company, overseeing the growth of enterprises in a variety of fields, including orthopedics, dentistry and laboratory analysis. In 1977 he became a consultant to Philips Medical Systems and soon thereafter joined the firm as Senior VP of Marketing in the U.S. and later of Strategic Planning worldwide. He still is a consultant to Philips Medical.
At the end of the 1980s he became Senior VP of a New York investment firm, helping them to evaluate and negotiate acquisitions in the medical field. He continues to devote some of his time to that association. He also became affiliated with a Washington D.C. based health care consulting firm specializing in providing strategic advice on reimbursement issues.
His ongoing consulting work in the field of diagnostic imaging has involved
specific projects for several companies in that field, in addition to Philips,
and also in the field of radiation therapy. In the course of his years of
working with the medical profession and industry he has been a member of the
board of directors of over a dozen companies in the U.S., in Europe and in
China and has served on the board of various health care industry associations.
