Professor René Botnar is Chair of Cardiovascular Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences.

He received his PhD from the ETH Zurich. From 1996-97 he was a Research Associate in the Department of Radiology at the University Zurich. In 1997, he joined the Cardiac MR Center at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. In 2003, he then became the Scientific Director of the Cardiac MR Center at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and was appointed to Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. In 2005, Dr Botnar accepted a Professorship of Biomedical Imaging at the Technische Universität München, where he set up a cardiac MR programme with a special focus on pre-clinical and translational multi-modality imaging. His work was funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education, by the German Excellence Program, and by industry.

At the end of 2007, he joined the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s, where he is currently Chair of Cardiovascular Imaging and Head of the Biomedical Engineering Department. Dr Botnar is a Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Medicine and the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. He was a board member of Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance from 2008-2011 and was on the scientific advisory board of the High Risk Plaque initiative. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance, a Senior Editor of the Journal of Molecular Imaging and Biology and has authored more than 270 peer-reviewed original papers, 40 review articles and 25 book chapters in the field of cardiac magnetic resonance. He also holds 9 patents and is an editor of a textbook on Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging.