photo of james brink

James Brink

Radiologist-in-Chief, Massachusetts General Hospital
Juan M. Taveras Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School

BSEE 1980


“The background in electrical engineering that I received at Purdue has served me well my entire career. While I did not work as an engineer, I applied the critical thinking skills developed in engineering school to medical imaging and focused my research at the intersection of these two disciplines.”


James A. Brink earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1980. He is Radiologist-in-Chief at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Juan M. Taveras Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Brink received his MD from Indiana University before completing residency and fellowship at MGH in 1990. He joined the faculty of Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, and was an associate professor when he left to join the faculty at Yale University in 1997. Brink served as chair of Yale’s Department of Diagnostic Radiology from 2006 to 2013 before returning to MGH as Radiologist-in-Chief.  He is a fellow of the Society for Computed Body Tomography/Magnetic Resonance and the American College of Radiology (ACR) and past-president of the American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) and ACR.  Brink is vice-chair of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and secretary for the International Society for Strategic Studies in Radiology. He is a recipient of the ARRS Gold Medal and an honorary member of the European Society of Radiology, the Japanese Radiological Society, the Italian Society of Medical Radiology, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, and the International Organization for Medical Physics.  Dr. Brink has broad experience in medical imaging, with expertise in issues related to the monitoring and control of medical radiation exposure.