Karen Belkic, MD, PhD Claremont Graduate University, California, USA
Karen (maiden name Edinger) Belkic is a clinical scientist with a PhD in neuroscience and physician specialist in internal medicine. She is adjunct professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research and at the Claremont Graduate University School of Community and Global Health. She is also affiliated to the Oncology and Pathology Department of the Karolinska Institute, where she holds a scientific tenure position. She earned her M.D. degree at University of Southern California School of Medicine.Her research activities are broad within several areas including preventive medicine, diagnostics and rehabilitation. In stress research and in molecular imaging, she has six published books and over 100 full length papers in peer-reviewed journals with over 1500 external citations. She has twice been co-editor of special topical issues in peer-reviewed international journals. Her work has strived to bridge clinical and basic scientific domains, seeking to answer to both these callings, by addressing difficult questions raised by multi-disciplinary, translational research. Her major goal has been to find non-invasive, sensitive and specific tools that can identify initial and often reversible changes, at a stage when timely intervention could be most effective. Her interest and expertize is in early detection, risk assessment and prevention with a focus on cancer and heart disease, with attention to psychosocial factors and the potential mediating mechanisms. Her current scientific activity is focused upon improvement of early cancer detection through in vivo magnetic resonance by enhancing the diagnostic information obtained by applying modern advances in signal and imaging processing to signals encoded from patients with cancers, and comparing these to findings from non-malignant tissue. Younger women at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer are a particular target group.
Karen Belkic has taken a broad view, looking not just at the immediate (i.e., proximal) markers of risk, but taking into account the more distal, and potentially key, determinants of disease. Thus, she has been very interested in how the environment (especially the work environment) impacts upon target organs, often mediated by the central nervous system. Within this framework, she has developed multi-level models. These incorporate, inter alia, non-linear, parametric methods in signal processing in relation to multiple physiological time signals for functional diagnostic testing. She is the originator of the widely implemented "Occupational Stressor Index", a practical diagnostic tool for assessment and subsequent modification of the work environment. She is involved in risk assessment and determinants of adherence to cancer screening guidelines among vulnerable groups as well as design, implementation and testing of interventions for patients with cancer to return to health-promoting work conditions. Karen Belkic has a special interest in pedagogy, in particular to help medical students and physicians at various levels of training acquire an appreciation of the importance of signal processing for medical diagnostics and to be able to identify situations in which this could be of critical significance in the clinical context, especially for cancer diagnostics.