Drew Weisenberger
As Chief Technology Officer, Drew Weisenberger is responsible for advancing the development of technology from Jefferson Lab’s research programs and facilitating the transfer of technologies to industry.
Since 1990, he has been a member of the Experimental Nuclear Physics Division’s Radiation Detector and Imaging Group and took on leadership of the group in 2008. He continues to lead the group in support of Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Nuclear Physics program and leverages the group’s technology advances in applications beyond nuclear physics. The group has developed application specific radiation imaging systems for clinical, pre-clinical and plant biology research with involvement from numerous collaborators.
Weisenberger has more than 20 years of experience in the physics of the operation, design and construction of radiation detectors based on scintillator and solid state technologies for non-imaging and imaging applications. He led a multi-institute collaboration on the development of a novel small animal imaging system based on nuclear medicine. The system permits brain-based studies using small animal models without the complications of anesthesia. He has authored or coauthored more than a hundred articles on instrumentation development and applications that have been published as research papers, review articles, book chapters or conference records. He has several patents that Jefferson Lab has licensed. In 2009, Weisenberger and members of the group received an “Excellence in Technology Transfer” award by the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer for “Breast-Specific Gamma Imaging.”
Weisenberger holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy and a Ph.D. from The College of William and Mary in applied science. He came to Jefferson Lab after working as a research associate with the Institute for Space Science and Technology in Gainesville, Fla., where he was part of a team that developed experiments that were conducted on the space shuttle, and he was involved in a project that examined Halley’s Comet.