Joanna S. Fowler is a Scientist Emeritus at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. August 9, 1942 in Miami, Florida, United States. She was born on  She served as Director of Brookhaven’s Radiotracer Chemistry, Instrumentation and Biological Imaging Program. Fowler studied the effect of disease, drugs, and aging on the human brain and radiotracers in brain chemistry. She has received many awards for her pioneering work, including the National Medal of Science. Fowler received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Colorado in 1967 and did her postdoctoral work at the University of East Anglia in England and at Brookhaven. Fowler worked at Brookhaven from 1969 until her retirement in January 2014. Dr. Fowler has made significant contributions to brain research.  Beginning in the 70’s, together with other researchers, Dr. Fowler developed a radiotracer to measure brain glucose metabolism non-invasively in humans.  This tracer, 18FDG, has become the most widely used radiotracer in basic research and clinical settings, and has facilitated tremendous advances in the study of the human brain and in tumor detection in the patients with cancer.