“I learned at a lot at Tsinghua University, but I still lacked practical experience and medical knowledge. Johns Hopkins has the best reputation in these areas,” she says. Still, there was no guarantee that she would be accepted to the school, even though she had achieved excellent grades. For one thing, the policy of the Biomedical Engineering Department until that time had been to conduct all interviews at the Johns Hopkins campus – but the department allowed her interview to be conducted by telephone. “I was the first Chinese student accepted by the Biomedical doctoral program directly from mainland China,” Li Pan recalls.

Li Pan went to the U.S. in 1999 and wrote her doctoral dissertation there on Applications for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in Cardiovascular Examinations. Li Pan joined Siemens Corporate Research and began working at the Johns Hopkins Baltimore medical campus in 2006. She took a position as a research scientist at the Center for Applied Medical Imaging – a collaboration between Siemens Healthcare and Siemens Corporate Research – at a time when Siemens was just launching a collaboration program with Johns Hopkins. “I only had to move from the fourth floor of the Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center down to the third floor – and I quickly converted myself from a Siemens customer to a Siemens employee,” she recalls.

Since that time she has worked within the framework of the partnership on applications such as the use of MR in cancer treatments and in MR-guided interventional procedures. Li Pan is responsible for research projects that address the use of MRI to monitor and track catheters in real time as they move through a patient’s body. Beyond that, she is responsible for research and clinical collaborations between Siemens Healthcare and medical research institutes.

Li Pan sums up her experience after four years at Siemens as follows: “I really appreciate the openness among our researchers and their great team spirit. Working together with a leading research hospital presents tremendous opportunities for developing and testing ideas. We interact each day with clinical staff and fellow researchers, so we are very closely in tune with clinical needs.”

Her research in MRI is an emerging field, which is why Li Pan sees her work as very challenging: “Every day we face problems for which there are no standard solutions. My job really couldn’t be any more exciting.” Li Pan dedicates her free time to her husband, who is also a Chinese graduate from Johns Hopkins University, and their young son.