Member Spotlight: Shella Keilholz

At the end of my undergraduate degree in physics, I was trying to decide between graduate school and medical school when I visited UVA and learned about their MRI research program. The combination of interesting physics and medical applications sounded like the perfect compromise.

It’s amazing that MR is so flexible. There are so many types of contrast, and we are still discovering more! It fascinates me that we can learn about a type of anatomical structure or function, perhaps from histology, and then try to develop an MR method to see it in vivo—or  we can observe something new and unexpected with MRI, and then go back to biology to try to explain the observation.

With a 3rd grader and 6th grader, my husband and I have a complicated schedule, but a typical day might go something like this: we get the kids on the bus by 7, then drive an hour to work. I spend most of my days writing and editing papers, putting grants and reports together, meeting with students, and serving on committees. One of the parts that I really enjoy is my work as the program director for preclinical MRI, where I get to meet with other researchers and help them figure out how we can get them the information that they need with MRI. I teach graduate classes on MRI and other imaging modalities, and on a really good day, I might test something new on the 9.4 T scanner or try an exploratory analysis on some of our data. At the end of the day, I either take my kids to their afterschool activities, or if it’s my husband’s night to handle the kids, I go to the aikido dojo for some practice before heading home. Then I usually squeeze in a tiny bit more work before bed.

Besides aikido, I am learning to play the Celtic harp, paint watercolors, and speak German, but I’m very bad at all of it. I love any form of flying and plan to start hang gliding again as soon as my kids are old enough to take care of me when I break a bone.

I joined the ISMRM in 1999—the annual meeting that year was my first conference. I didn’t have anything to present or any funding to go, but the meeting was in Philadelphia, so I rode up with my advisor and slept on the floor in some students’ hotel room. I was so excited that I spent hours going through the program and mapped out an impossible schedule that had me jumping in and out of sessions to see specific talks. I had no idea that the convention center would be so big! Even though my plans didn’t work out, there were so many wonderful talks that I went home with a million ideas and even some new friends and fellow MRI-fanatics that I’d met at the poster sessions. I’ve been to every annual meeting since.

The Brain Function Study Group has to be my favorite right now because I’m really looking forward to the workshop they are hosting this fall in Padua. I’ve also been involved with the Cellular and Molecular group, the Perfusion group, and the High Field group. The study groups are great because they feel like communities within ISMRM that share the same interests and challenges.

I am also part of the ISMRM Family Committee. The Family Committee is part of ISMRM’s inclusivity efforts. We were involved in developing the grants for childcare and accessibility, and in general making the annual meeting friendlier to those with caretaking responsibilities. When my own kids were babies, I was already a faculty member and financially stable, but even so it was a struggle to travel with an infant and caregiver who were not allowed in the meeting, or to find a place to pump if I had to be away from the baby. Until then, I’d never realized how discouraging it could feel for young parents, and I am really happy that ISMRM is taking steps to help them feel welcome.