Andrew G. Horti

ANDREW G. HORTI, PH.D., M.S. is the second recipient of The Russell H. Morgan Professorship in the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science.  He serves as a Professor in the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.

Dr. Horti earned his undergraduate degree in physical chemistry and his doctorate in organic chemistry at the Leningrad Institute of Technology in the USSR. In 1992, he joined Johns Hopkins as a post-doctoral fellow in positron emission tomography (PET) radiochemistry, followed by an additional post-doc fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine. He returned to Baltimore to serve as chief radiochemist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s PET facility. He joined the Johns Hopkins Radiology faculty as an assistant professor in 2004, subsequently rising through the ranks to professor.

His work in developing several high-affinity PET imaging agents places Dr. Horti at the forefront in the field of radiopharmaceuticals. Several of his radiotracers have been used in human-subject clinical trials, and he has developed PET tracers for imaging notoriously difficult nicotinic receptor subtypes to enable PET groups worldwide to study their functions for the first time. Most recently, Dr. Horti developed the first clinical radiotracer for imaging a receptor involved in neuroinflammatory disorders.

Beyond his direct research work, Dr. Horti is an exceptional mentor to postdoctoral fellows, and an active member of the NIH. He has fostered national and international collaborations through his valuable PET imaging compounds and the data they have enabled.