-Director, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
-Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
-Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

Research:
Dr. Gray's research is geared toward understanding and ultimately preventing or slowing the cartilage degeneration that affects at least six out of 10 people over age 45.

Career Highlights:
Dr. Gray received her BS in computer science from Michigan State University in 1978, her SM in electrical engineering in 1981 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her PhD in medical engineering and medical physics in 1986 from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Motivated to understand how mechanical forces were either "healthy" or "harmful" for cartilage, Professor Gray was among the first to explore how mechanical forces influenced cartilage metabolism, showing that, in the short term, static loading depressed synthesis, while short bouts of dynamic loading, enhanced synthesis. More recently, the efforts of Professor Gray and her colleagues have focused on molecular imaging of cartilage, to provide nondestructive MRI-based images that reveal the biochemical and functional properties of the tissue. She and her group proposed a method to measure glycosaminoglycan (GAG), and have since shown it to be feasible and technically valid both in vitro and in vivo. Now known by the acronym dGEMRIC, this method has attracted considerable attention by researchers in academia and industry who seek to understand and treat arthritis. Regions of tissue that are functionally inadequate can be distinguished from normal tissue even when the entire tissue is anatomically intact (and looks normal with the usual imaging methods), and changes in the tissue can be monitored non-destructively.

Dr. Gray is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and presently serves as the chair of the College of Fellows. She is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Orthopaedic Research and the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering. She is also on the Board of Directors of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and a member of the Orthopaedic Research Society.