Moskal, Pawel

Pawel Moskal, Ph.D. is an inventor of cost-effective positron emission tomography based on plastic scintillators and the method of positronium imaging. He conceived and headed a medical experiment demonstrating the first positronium images of the human brain in-vivo. He is Professor of physics and the head of the Cluster of Nuclear Physics Departments and the head of the Department of Particle Physics and Applications at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. He won the Prime Minister’s award for his doctoral dissertation in 1999 and a Gold Medal for the invention of the matrix device for Positron Emission Tomography at The World Exhibition on Innovation, Research and New Technologies at Brussels Innova 2009. Prof. Moskal has coauthored 42 patents in Europe, USA and Japan, and more than 360 scientific articles in the field of nuclear and particle physics and positron emission tomography. In the years 2015-2017 he was a member of the SPSC Scientific Committee at CERN, and since 2020 he is a Member of the Committee on Medical Physics, Radiobiology and X-Ray Imaging, Polish Academy of Sciences. At present he is leading the J-PET collaboration: an international and interdisciplinary research team at the Jagiellonian University conducting research and development of a new imaging device based on plastic scintillators. This research aims at the construction of a cost effective portable and modular total-body PET for experiments with positronium in basic physics, biophysics and medical diagnostics, e.g. for studies of discrete symmetries in the decays of positronium, the development and tests of multi-photon imaging, and the study of properties of positronium atoms in living organisms, opening new perspectives to study the dynamics of metabolism and tissue pathology in-vivo in the whole human body simultaneously. Prof. Pawel Moskal was awarded many prizes including the Prime Minister Medal for Merit for Invention and Minister of Education and Science Award for significant achievements in the implementation of inventions. He received also the Minister of Science and Higher Education Award for outstanding achievements in educational and scientific supervision.

Professor Moskal was coordinator of the COSY-11 international collaboration conducting experiments on meson production at the Cooler Synchrotron COSY at FZ-Jülich in Germany and deputy-coordinator of the WASA-at-COSY experiment, which comprises about 150 physicists testing fundamental symmetries in nature by means of the decays of mesons. He is also a member of the KLOE-2 and SIDDHARTA-2 collaborations conducting experiments at the electron-positron collider DAFNE in Italy. These experiments include tests of quantum mechanics, exotic mesonic atoms, and searching for phenomena beyond the standard model of particle physics. Prof. Moskal chaired the scientific and organizing committees of nineteen international symposia and workshops devoted to fundamental and applied physics and served as the (co-)editor of the proceedings books.