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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Weili Lin, PhD, professor of radiology, neurology and biomedical engineering and director of the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center, has been appointed The Dixie Lee Boney Soo Distinguished Professor in Neurological Medicine.

The professorship was established with a $666,000 gift from Dr. L.Y. Soo, a 1955 graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his wife, Dr. Dixie Lee Boney Soo of Chapel Hill, N.C. The gift from the Dr.’s Soo has been matched with $333,000 from the state of North Carolina to create the $1 million distinguished professorship.

“This gift was given to honor my wife, Dr. Dixie L. Boney Soo,” said Dr. L.Y. Soo. “We hope Dr. Lin’s future work will shed more information about frontal temporal dementia.”

Dr. Dixie Soo was a neurology resident at UNC from 1961 to 1964, and was on the teaching staff in 1964-65. Then she practiced neurology for 27 years in Lima, Ohio where she was much beloved by her patients and her staff. She retired to Chapel Hill after a life of service to patients with neurologic disease; and now Dixie herself has a difficult neurologic disorder.

“We welcome Dr. Lin into the chair that bears Dixie Soo’s name, and charge him to pursue answers for neurologic illnesses that still affect patients every day,” said Dr. Matt Ewend, Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery.

“Dr. Lin is recognized world-wide for his scientific accomplishments in the field of magnetic resonance brain imaging. We at Carolina are lucky to have him as our colleague,” said William J. Powers, MD, H. Houston Merritt Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurology.

Dr. Lin earned his MS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University and joined the UNC faculty in 1999. Currently, he is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Stroke, Translational Stroke Research and Radiology Research and Practice. He edited a special issue of the journal Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Biomedicine focusing on functional MRI and served as associate editor of the journal Current Protocols in Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

He serves as an ad hoc member on multiple study sections and site visit teams at the National Institutes of Health and has been a member and an ad hoc member of multiple committees of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the NIH. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, many of which appeared in high-impact journals. He serves as principal investigator on three current NIH research project grants totaling more than $750,000 annually and as a co-investigator on several other NIH-funded projects focusing on cancer imaging, brain development, schizophrenia, muscular dystrophy and autism.